A long night’s journey
Somewhere around 5 o’clock yesterday afternoon, I started crying and couldn’t stop. I had received sad news day before yesterday and it’s meaning was deeper than its surface. A chapter was closing in my life, one that has been filled with rancorous challenges, excitement and all in the company of like-minded people who I’ve come to regard as my family. I started looking through old photographs of us, these people, and each photo is punctuated by laughter, by insanity, by living life to its fullest and sadly as I got to one photograph in particular I counted all the people in it that are no longer in my day to day life and it shook me.
T made us dinner with candlelight and I had a glass of a delicious Concannon Petite Syrah that my neighbor had left on my doorstep (one of those anonymous gifts that seem to show up in my life when I need them most – call me lucky). I ate the Vietnamese shrimp salad and talked about how this is a sad time for me, losing these people from my daily life – it’s not like they’re dead or anything, it’s that we are no longer working together and this signifies an end to an era in my life and its passing is like mourning someone dead.
In the middle of the night, I woke because I dreamt that I had three dogs – Lucky, Sangi and Moes (all friends’ dogs) and had to take them to pee at night and when we got outside to the dark outdoors, I saw Moes lying on the grass with two of his arms pulled off and bleeding. I picked him up and cradled him to me and yelled, “Call 911!, Call 911!, Call 911!” and Tatjana shook me out of this ghastly dream and it took a while for me to recover my senses.
My dreams have always been transparent just like me and that dream was a riff on something I had said earlier in the day, that when one of my friends had left late last year it was like I was severing my right hand, and now with this other news, my left hand is severed. My friends (my friends’ dogs), moving from the light and comfort of the house into the dark and uncertain outdoors, the disembodied, the blood-letting, the cry for help, and the anguish are all manifestations of the gloom that grabbed ahold of me and has not let up.
Unfortunately, there is no one to answer 911 and I realize this too will be a turning point in my life, a chapter closing, and I must gear myself, open myself, and get ready for the next chapter rather than stay curled up in a ball bemoaning the end, because all joy rides have to stop at some point or else you run out of gas.
My horoscope this morning – as always – appropriate:
September 23, 2010
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Taurus (4/20-5/20)After days of mulling things over, shuffling around the house in your jammies (okay, and maybe pouting, just a tad, too), you’re ready to stop this nonsense, get the show on the road and let those feelings out. You’ve kept quiet for long enough — it’s what’s keeping you in hibernation, after all, if you admit it to yourself. It’s time to say what’s on your mind and free yourself up. Make the appropriate calls.