Fruit Punch Moments.
I can't work. Not this week. Two things I'm in the middle of are roadblocked, and I'm just . . . tired. Not physically, I'm actually restless and bored, just . . . emotionally, creatively. Yeah, there's this wellspring and yadda yadda yadda, and someday it'll all come gushing back, and there will be wine and roses and kittens romping in the clover, but right now it's crusty roadkill toads and a sense of frustration.
I feel like I can't do anything right. I feel a need for escape, and I'm not getting it.
Oh, my heart's light enough to sail in - but that's some mighty deep water down below. And, well, we all know how I feel about things that live in the water. I had a little good news today, and the company of a friend, but there's precious little wind in my sails just now.
I wonder what would happen if we could find a way to control what we dreamed. Blah me that blah about lucid dreaming all you want, but it's not a technique that's easy to master. Believe me, I know.
Dreams are necessary, they're your brain's way of communicating what it needs to communicate, and if you're semi-superstitious, like I can be, then they're also a way for That Which Is to communicate with you, when it needs to. A stroke of precognition, like cinematic foreshadowing, isn't unknown in my dreams. Nor are startling images; most of my stories begin with something I lifted from a dream, did you know that?
What would happen if you had control over the content of your dreams? Would you get more of the release that you need, or less? Would it be better for us, or worse, to be able to edit out the dreams we don't want, to keep the memories we can't handle from blindsiding us as we sleep?
I've been dreaming a lot about Mother. Not surprising at all. Been dreaming a lot about living back at home, at my parent's house. Even after all this time, I still think of that as "home"; I was one of the few people I know who lived for all 18 years of my childhood in the same house, and this place is nice, but it's never felt anything but temporary to me, like a comfortable hotel.
Anyway, she's alive in my dreams, very talkative, though it's never anything Huge And Important she's saying. I recall trying to defend my affection for Nora Roberts/J. D. Robb novels to her, quite successfully I thought.
In my dreams, she's alive, but about halfway through I inevitably remember that she's dead and I realize that it's a dream. I usually don't wake up, but the whole dream is pervaded by this fragile sort of sadness, the way you feel watching video footage of someone when you know they've been dead for years. Try watching a movie, like Karloff's Frankenstein, for example, and tell yourself that the cute little girl who drowns is dead. Try watching The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, where Clint Eastwood is sort of idly playing with the kitten in his hat, and tell yourself that beyond a doubt that cat is dead. It's sad. It's like watching fate creep up on someone through hindsight's 20/20 binoculars. A terrible feeling.
In my dreams, she doesn't know she's dead. And I don't want to tell her, I don't want her to know. I don't know. Maybe I'm afraid she'll go away. She's just a ghost, and there's something unspeakably frail about her presence in my dreams. She's hollow, just a shell, but she's at least there a little bit. And in stories when you tell a ghost it isn't real it pretty much has to go away. So when I dream, I stay quiet about it.
I really have not talked about this much, I know I really don't. It's not my intention to make you think I spend all my time brooding about it. Nine tenths of the time I'm okay with most of it, I knew it was going to happen. Things have gotten better since I've been able not to worry about her. Shit. My complexion has improved, I've lost a little weight, my energy is better, I'm less prone to worry.
There's an odd angle to it, though. Memories are like a forest - a whole made up of many living things. It can't perceive itself, but it exists, and the trees can experience it. And when someone dies, it's like another tree falls. So now all my family memories are short a tree. And there are some memories that only I have. Being the youngest, I will very likely be the final custodian of all these memories. I'm fine with that, because it's not like I don't have people I love who aren't family to make new and meaningful memories with. But it's a lonely feeling. Not in the sense of being alone, no; if the past couple of years are any indication, I will never lack for young and vibrant companions, even in my twilight. But lonely in the sense of a thing not shared.
And everyone who has lost someone brings this one thing up at one time or another: I don't want to forget. But I will. And how long will it be before I do?
I still have the clothes I took from her closet in a pair of plastic bags. They still smell a little like her. I want to wear them, but . . . dude, if I wash them. . . . She smelled different at the end, I think cancer did something to her chemistry, and I know dying does, it has a smell, but some of those clothes have her old scent.
How long before I forget her voice? I could go for weeks without talking to her, so two and a half months without hearing her speak is nothing, really. But I wonder. What was the longest time I'd gone withoug speaking to her? When will I have passed that point? Have I passed it already? I think I have. My sister had saved a voice-mail message Mom left her in early December, but the fucking phone company changed voice mail services and it got deleted before she could find a way to record it. Still, she had it for a while after Mom was gone, so she was probably the last person to hear her voice. What about the other Mom-sounds? When you live with someone for 18 years, you learn to recognize from sound alone how they shut the bathroom door, made coffee, changed a videocassette, opened a can of cat food. I don't miss her coughing fits, or how she used to get up at three in the morning, or her awful taste in music, but then again I sort of do.
It's a theme that's been done to death in fiction, movies, you name it. Dork that I am, I keep thinking of Anya in Buffy Season 5, when she just can't handle the death of another character.
"But I don't understand! I don't understand how this all happens, how we go through this; I mean I knew her and then she's . . . there's just a body. I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead; it's stupid, it's mortal and stupid. Xander's crying and not talking and I was having fruit punch and I thought that [she] would never have any more fruit punch and she'd never have eggs, or yawn, or brush her hair, not ever and no one will explain. . . !"
I don't know if I'll ever be able to watch that episode again. For me, that was possibly the most heartbreaking moment in the show up to that point. Because I understand it. Like most of us, Anya was terrible at being human, she had no idea what it was about. Unlike most of us, she knew it, and even though the other characters sometimes forgot that she really wasn't human, the writers never did. There we have, in one paragraph, the entire human reaction to death, laid bare with typical Anya bluntness.
I'm having a lot of fruit punch moments these days.
I try not to be bitter, and mostly I succeed, but there are moments when I realize with perfect clarity that I am too young for this, and she was too young for this, and that there are people in their fifties, sixties, who still have one parent, or two. And it's hard not to be a little unhappy about it when even your language constantly jabs you with it. I can't refer to my parents as a unit anymore without dissonance, because what tense do you use when one is alive and one is dead? "My parents are decent people?" "My parents were quite literate?" Neither one feels right.
I'm really tired, and I need to sleep, but it seems like a lot of work to go get in bed just so I can be reminded over and over again that things have changed for the suckier, just so I can feel my loss.
I feel like I can't do anything right. I feel a need for escape, and I'm not getting it.
Oh, my heart's light enough to sail in - but that's some mighty deep water down below. And, well, we all know how I feel about things that live in the water. I had a little good news today, and the company of a friend, but there's precious little wind in my sails just now.
I wonder what would happen if we could find a way to control what we dreamed. Blah me that blah about lucid dreaming all you want, but it's not a technique that's easy to master. Believe me, I know.
Dreams are necessary, they're your brain's way of communicating what it needs to communicate, and if you're semi-superstitious, like I can be, then they're also a way for That Which Is to communicate with you, when it needs to. A stroke of precognition, like cinematic foreshadowing, isn't unknown in my dreams. Nor are startling images; most of my stories begin with something I lifted from a dream, did you know that?
What would happen if you had control over the content of your dreams? Would you get more of the release that you need, or less? Would it be better for us, or worse, to be able to edit out the dreams we don't want, to keep the memories we can't handle from blindsiding us as we sleep?
I've been dreaming a lot about Mother. Not surprising at all. Been dreaming a lot about living back at home, at my parent's house. Even after all this time, I still think of that as "home"; I was one of the few people I know who lived for all 18 years of my childhood in the same house, and this place is nice, but it's never felt anything but temporary to me, like a comfortable hotel.
Anyway, she's alive in my dreams, very talkative, though it's never anything Huge And Important she's saying. I recall trying to defend my affection for Nora Roberts/J. D. Robb novels to her, quite successfully I thought.
In my dreams, she's alive, but about halfway through I inevitably remember that she's dead and I realize that it's a dream. I usually don't wake up, but the whole dream is pervaded by this fragile sort of sadness, the way you feel watching video footage of someone when you know they've been dead for years. Try watching a movie, like Karloff's Frankenstein, for example, and tell yourself that the cute little girl who drowns is dead. Try watching The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, where Clint Eastwood is sort of idly playing with the kitten in his hat, and tell yourself that beyond a doubt that cat is dead. It's sad. It's like watching fate creep up on someone through hindsight's 20/20 binoculars. A terrible feeling.
In my dreams, she doesn't know she's dead. And I don't want to tell her, I don't want her to know. I don't know. Maybe I'm afraid she'll go away. She's just a ghost, and there's something unspeakably frail about her presence in my dreams. She's hollow, just a shell, but she's at least there a little bit. And in stories when you tell a ghost it isn't real it pretty much has to go away. So when I dream, I stay quiet about it.
I really have not talked about this much, I know I really don't. It's not my intention to make you think I spend all my time brooding about it. Nine tenths of the time I'm okay with most of it, I knew it was going to happen. Things have gotten better since I've been able not to worry about her. Shit. My complexion has improved, I've lost a little weight, my energy is better, I'm less prone to worry.
There's an odd angle to it, though. Memories are like a forest - a whole made up of many living things. It can't perceive itself, but it exists, and the trees can experience it. And when someone dies, it's like another tree falls. So now all my family memories are short a tree. And there are some memories that only I have. Being the youngest, I will very likely be the final custodian of all these memories. I'm fine with that, because it's not like I don't have people I love who aren't family to make new and meaningful memories with. But it's a lonely feeling. Not in the sense of being alone, no; if the past couple of years are any indication, I will never lack for young and vibrant companions, even in my twilight. But lonely in the sense of a thing not shared.
And everyone who has lost someone brings this one thing up at one time or another: I don't want to forget. But I will. And how long will it be before I do?
I still have the clothes I took from her closet in a pair of plastic bags. They still smell a little like her. I want to wear them, but . . . dude, if I wash them. . . . She smelled different at the end, I think cancer did something to her chemistry, and I know dying does, it has a smell, but some of those clothes have her old scent.
How long before I forget her voice? I could go for weeks without talking to her, so two and a half months without hearing her speak is nothing, really. But I wonder. What was the longest time I'd gone withoug speaking to her? When will I have passed that point? Have I passed it already? I think I have. My sister had saved a voice-mail message Mom left her in early December, but the fucking phone company changed voice mail services and it got deleted before she could find a way to record it. Still, she had it for a while after Mom was gone, so she was probably the last person to hear her voice. What about the other Mom-sounds? When you live with someone for 18 years, you learn to recognize from sound alone how they shut the bathroom door, made coffee, changed a videocassette, opened a can of cat food. I don't miss her coughing fits, or how she used to get up at three in the morning, or her awful taste in music, but then again I sort of do.
It's a theme that's been done to death in fiction, movies, you name it. Dork that I am, I keep thinking of Anya in Buffy Season 5, when she just can't handle the death of another character.
"But I don't understand! I don't understand how this all happens, how we go through this; I mean I knew her and then she's . . . there's just a body. I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead; it's stupid, it's mortal and stupid. Xander's crying and not talking and I was having fruit punch and I thought that [she] would never have any more fruit punch and she'd never have eggs, or yawn, or brush her hair, not ever and no one will explain. . . !"
I don't know if I'll ever be able to watch that episode again. For me, that was possibly the most heartbreaking moment in the show up to that point. Because I understand it. Like most of us, Anya was terrible at being human, she had no idea what it was about. Unlike most of us, she knew it, and even though the other characters sometimes forgot that she really wasn't human, the writers never did. There we have, in one paragraph, the entire human reaction to death, laid bare with typical Anya bluntness.
I'm having a lot of fruit punch moments these days.
I try not to be bitter, and mostly I succeed, but there are moments when I realize with perfect clarity that I am too young for this, and she was too young for this, and that there are people in their fifties, sixties, who still have one parent, or two. And it's hard not to be a little unhappy about it when even your language constantly jabs you with it. I can't refer to my parents as a unit anymore without dissonance, because what tense do you use when one is alive and one is dead? "My parents are decent people?" "My parents were quite literate?" Neither one feels right.
I'm really tired, and I need to sleep, but it seems like a lot of work to go get in bed just so I can be reminded over and over again that things have changed for the suckier, just so I can feel my loss.