It's strange the way questions can become haunting things. Not only in the conscious world, but even in dreams, I imagine that the questions that are asked of me, even the questions that I hear someone else ask of someone else, are just endless circles that sink deeper and are swallowed into the mind, becoming an endless paradox that is constantly attempting to be answered, and it isn't that the answer unravels me, it's just the state of being, that present point in time, which makes everything shift. And maybe I am just far too haunted by my dreams; maybe, they ask too much of me.
Last night, I slept in pain, and it is not a pain that I can easily explain. I was asleep and suddenly awake and it felt as my left, in it's entirety, had decided to let go, and sink into world. It felt like a bruise like a burn; it felt like my body was being stuffed full of pine needles. I felt like a prop that could not pull myself away. In my dreams, it was Christmas again, and I was in places I used to go that were absolutely not the same, seeing people I still know that don't seem at all the same, and I don't know what it was I was so haunted by, but I ran. My mother yelled at me as if I were four, and she and my father chased me through the grass, and the grass was so difficult to run through, and I came to a door and asked a grasshopper if I could go in.
Tim said that I talked so much in my sleep last night; that my voice was so anxiety ridden, I sounded as if I were going to cry. I told him my dream, and he asked if I were four; I don't know, I said, but maybe. I did talk to a grasshopper. And he said that I poked him too, in my sleep, and I told him about the pain of waking up when it is still so dark outside, but I could not describe the deep hurt to it' entirety, so I got up and remembered something I wanted to remember, to wake him up and say, when I woke up with that pain, but
I could only think about how if I were to die during Langston's delivery, then Tim would have to promise not to move, so if I were a ghost, I could find him and Langston, and I could help out. I thought of how this would be; how my parents would help, how maybe Tim's brother would move in. It all made perfect sense, as this crippling, but sad, but functioning thing, and I was certain that if it happened, I would find them.
I think I'm so scared because I'm so happy, and I've never been so happy, not since before i was six years old, and realized that black sadness I had to carry with me. The other night, I told Tim about the moment I realized that I was sad when I was small:
I was at my grandparents' house in Citrus Park, and it was dusk and I was wearing pink and I was all alone, standing on this swing that my grandfather built, staring at the sky, and it was almost Christmas, and I was thinking about what I wanted, and I was talking to God. Even now when I pray, I start so formal, which most people may do; I say a prayer I've always known so the intimacy of space and distance can adjust. I want to feel like God, as GOD, has leaned down from the heavens in order to hear me better.
But even then, I never expected anything. Even at six, I talked about the parts I wished would disappear, but I understood if they couldn't, and I asked for a locket instead. And every year, I got the locket.
When I think of the questions, and those I never want my son to have to ask or be asked, I think about how insanely difficult some questions are to answer, but when the right answer does become aware, it's so easy to grasp.
There's always going to be dark parts; there is always going to be rooms I won't want to remember, but I need to focus on the room I am now in. Other people have built their own rooms; they built them years ago, and the sad and terrible, the menacing and painful things they do in their rooms are separate from mine.
I built my own, and it is not the hall of mirrors I used to fear; it's not a circus maze or a line-- the walls are not sinking, they are not crumbling, they are not caving in. There are windows, not prisms, and my baby cat sleeps in the windows and hunts from the windows and runs away from the world outside. The door has a lock, and only the person I trust most in the world has the key, and every time he walks in, it's no dream, no fantasy; he is nothing I have to make believe.
No comments:
Post a Comment