…where I toss and turn. But there are nights in this very bed where I fall into dreamless sleep or more possibly they are not nights without dreams; I just can’t listen to them, I cannot, or choose not to remember them. I mustn’t, they are too real; they are too painful. They speak too clearly and they hurt. When I wake, they are a new slap in the face, a new home run, a new right on the head.

I don’t want to wake up to the truth every morning. I don’t want to wake at 2:00AM and know, really know I am on a very scary planet; looking right out my window, I can look at another ball spinning in space somehow kept in its orbit; and there are so many others all in a semi-orderly fashion. If an earthquake hit, I would be shook out of my loft nest.

I don’t care if I die; then why should these dreams, these sleepless nights, hurt? That is not my fear. In fact dying would be a release from the constant feelings… memories. Why shouldn’t they hurt? Aren’t I living simply a physical existence? Isn’t this a dream from which I will wake from one day?

Didn’t he and I know before we came here that this would happen? Didn’t we carefully plan this? Didn’t we know as he and I squeezed into this world and entered into these bodies that we had little control over growing old, that we would meet again? Didn’t he reassure me that though I was going first, he would soon follow and we would know and not forget that I had to have the pain of lost love to understand the mind of god? Didn’t he say that I would act in ways that were illogical; that I would sometimes be crazed and the outcome would be my own doing and that I would have to do what I must, to go where I would arrive, to learn what I need to know?

Why then, with this knowledge, does listening to the damn radio make a tear glisten in the bottom of my eye and then fill the socket until it falls out onto my face and enters my mouth through my open lips mouthing question after question? I taste the salt and the memories cause a flood to fall from my eyes. I am how much water? I am apparently all water. I am all ocean. I am drowning because I can’t hear him anymore.

Didn’t he say it would be like this? Didn’t I live forty-seven milliseconds before I met him. I count them, forty-seven flashes of light, forty-seven lifetimes I lived before we met here. Then it was only five years, five grains of sand, five winks of an eye, five less than that… but it was wise, static, and eternal and now that I have seen him in the flesh and I cannot talk to him, nothing else seems to matter anymore except what I think might be beyond here because I have forgotten.

Home, nothing. Outside, nothing. What I wear, what I eat… nothing. I slept a few hours last night and woke up old. I read an entire book and then I cried alligator tears. I created a pond, a swamp in my bed. I only know what I know, I have no experience beyond me. But I do know what I know. I do know what I feel. I live in “elected wretchedness”. I knew that I was coming here. I made it happen while all around me the doors opened to take me to this place and I stepped in on my own. Alone; I have to be alone. I have to feel like this. I have to hurt. I have to have this pain.

What is he doing today? He wakes with his baby on his chest, laughing… behold! He’s speaking Spanish! Little Spanish baby-talk. He will get up and make coffee and yell at his lover that it is ready and he has already released his love deep into her recesses. He has a car to buy, to fix, to wash, to sell. The phone is ringing and he has a dozen friends waiting outside, cracking open beers and drinking at this early hour. The sun is shining and he is up and out the door. I know this; this was once my life.

I think at times that he remembers me. I push myself at him through the air, through my thoughts, to remind him of what we knew before. I am sure he remembers but it is way back behind diapers, the sex, the dinners, friends, music, dance. I can’t let go of that. He is everywhere, in the radio, in the cat he left behind, in the love letters, the poems, the music and those things that I find to help me forget.

The bones never forget, nor the soul. I am sure that he is mine and I am his forever. Maybe I will kiss him again and we will make love again. I don’t know. But I do know that in this life I ran into someone I recognized from some other time, some other place… we knew we had come here together.

He was dark, I was light. I liked it that way. He was energy, I was repose. I liked it that way.

It’s OK, I tell myself. You’re confused, I say. You have always been confused, I say. You have never known where you belong. You have never recognized your own house; not even as a girl. You have never fit. Why do expect to now, I ask myself. Nothing has changed. You are meant to be alone, I tell myself. You are meant to walk alone. You are meant to push the safety net away and walk on the tight rope and skim along the cliff and regret every move, like it mattered. You are meant to be painfully aware that your existence is nothing in the big, vast sky of things. Who is here to help you? Who is here to answer your why questions? No one.

Don’t expect relief. Don’t be so foolish to think that there is a person on earth that will help you cease and desist. You have to keep walking alone, like always. Now go… walk alone. Don’t be afraid. It’s OK to be sad. This is not your world. But the world is a lovelier place seen through the prism of tears. Only a few have the privilege to know that and you are one of them. Be glad that the world doesn’t seem like a stable place, that each time you put your foot down the earth gives a little and threatens to suck you under. This is the reality. This is not your dream. This is how you will live. It’s OK. There is nothing to fear. Your choices will never seem right. You will never be complete or completely happy. It is not meant to be.

2002 June 23