Enough To Dream

His nose was long and pointy but very handsome — classic Greek-ish with no sign of a lump or hump. She kept touching his face as a way of intimately letting him know that she was with him, in all senses of the word. They seemed to be spinning around each other like butterflies as they advanced toward where they were going. They continued to talk and share their thoughts as they went ahead. They were in love. They ended up at a farmhouse as it had been advised to them that they would find a place there to lay their heads and stay the night.

Suddenly they were in a single bed together — a twin size where they just fit if they were close together — which neither of them minded. It was a plush bed with lots of loft and softness and they were under warm covers. They couldn’t quit touching each other and ended up embracing with long kisses even though the keepers of the house and their children were milling all about in proximity of their bed. Everything was in one large room with a fireplace and wooden floors and dancing children who didn’t seem to want to go to sleep yet.

The children kept trying to engage them in conversations with questions and one or two pounced on the bed and on them some too. The parents, (who by then were in a bed of their own right across from the lovers), admonished, though very softly and with smiles, for them to stop pouncing. The children smiled back at their parents and kept asking the lovers questions — smiling at them too while waiting on the answers.

The lovers didn’t seem to mind. They were in a world of their own and felt as if they were really only one and whatever they might do would be invisible to others and it didn’t feel, even the slightest, tiniest bit, any kind of wrong to be in a big open, warm room with quite a few others as they lay there feeling so much love.

She touched his beautiful face some more. It felt so wonderful to be touching his face and it made her feel just like she was now complete and all the puzzle pieces were fitted in their rightful places. She could tell that he was comforted by her behavior — not letting many minutes go by without touching his face again. That is what lovers do to stay together after all — touch each other with words and feelings and hands and feet and pointy noses that might just happen to be a little bit classic Greek-ish.

She loved to look at his profile with his chiseled nose and curly brown hair and strong jaw. He was taller than she and she fit right under his arm comfortably, whenever they needed to fit. They made excuses to fit as often as they could.

They must have fallen asleep because the next thing she knew, it was cats pouncing and they were, all along probably the ones asking all the questions. Where had all the other people gone, including him? It must have been another dream and the cats were asking when their breakfast would be put in dishes for them — trying to rouse her by pouncing.

The handsome man had gone where handsome men always seem to go these days — to distant places with her dreams only to be woken again another morning just before rising with the hungry cats. It seems enough to dream these days since dreams are not much different than what happens in reality — if reality is real. At least in dreams — puzzle pieces fit and men are at their best.

 

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Of Sorrows Buried

She dreamed that she and her dear departed sister surprised their older sister with a very long distance, impromptu and unannounced visit. The older sister was busy in a shop that turned out to be hers and her husband’s. He was sitting, far in the back, behind a counter that was visible through a window on the wall there and saw his wife’s two sisters coming in so tipped his reading glasses down to watch what would happen next.
The two younger sisters said, “We’re moving here to where you are so that we can all be together again.”
The older sister could be intuited to be pleased even though her extremely subtle smile was barely noticeable. She wasn’t one to show emotion.
The visiting sisters who intended to move there, or were already moving — it’s hard to tell some of the minute details in dreams — started waltzing around her shop that only had some wonderful things lined up on or near walls like it was a gallery of sorts and only a few things resting on ledges and they both got excited at all the space still left in the shop that seemed available for them to bring in all their own collectibles, art and personally produced things for selling and helping their older sister and her husband get off the ground better — or so that’s where their minds went — the two who wanted so to move there and stay. They announced their excitement to their older sister.
The older sister hushed them like there was a spy in their midst and she didn’t want her real intentions known yet. There was some city resistance or a zoning issue pending intimated, but not loud enough for any spy to hear. Apparently she wouldn’t be altogether opposed to their ideas if and/or when any hindrances were out of the way.
The dream evoked a grand sense of fulfillment, of sorrows buried and fences mended and returned all the fantastic and wonderful feelings of youth and playing with her sisters to the dreamer’s soul.
She wondered if that was what she was wishing for in real life — to be near her living sister.
But, she’s read that some well-known psychologist, Jung or Freud, said that the person dreaming is everyone in their own dreams. That may very well be why some dreams can seem so good because the thoughts of others are really the thoughts of the dreamer and the dreamer can ‘write’ their dreams as they might a novel — how they want things to be.
Later in the day, long after waking from the dream, her childhood friend called and they drummed up their own ideas of moving to closer proximity of each other as sisters might. They were sisters that had chosen each other in freshman year of high school and had, all their lives, wanted to be more a part of each other’s daily life. Life gets in the way — college, marriage and a family for one, work and worry for the other had wedged them to be farther apart and on their own, but they had stayed in touch. Now that they were older, aches and pains were making them think that things might not should be long put off and how nice it would be to have someone like a sister to depend on some.
Age is a funny thing, though funny is a poor word to use. Funny queer. It can make you think you have to give up dreams. There are lots of things that one is well advised to give up — lots of things that are really only baggage at a point. Like, she’s probably never going to fly to the moon or be famous — though that is a thing that no one can really know — becoming famous. Flying to the moon is rather out of the question, but being famous might not be. The reasons for wanting to be famous might be different the older one gets. Late in life it might just be that being famous would pay for all the medical bills that Medicare won’t.
It would be nice to think that there aren’t ever going to be any serious medical bills because one has taken such good care of themselves that they are healthy and well enough to avoid them — but it is starting to seem that that is only a likely scenario if one started young or can figure out how to be their own placebo.
Learning to be one’s own placebo is a worthwhile endeavor that might be better put in front of flying to the moon or any hope that might be found in what sisters can be in dreams.

Inertia-Breaking Superhero

Nothing she was feeling about herself had any sense of congruence and things about that state of being might very well be what were causing the inertia that seemed impossible to be stopped of its tendency to keep her from changing. What outside force could come to save her?

Maybe a change in weather.

Aside from any sense of looking forward to adventures yet to come and fully knowing that she usually wouldn’t let much get in the way of proceeding henceforth, her bones and muscles weren’t behaving as they should and if she looked into a looking glass the person looking back didn’t match with the one she had in mind for being able and only seemed to serve as a reminder of all the things that lacked agreement.

Dreams have their own way of changing. The person housing them might not have much to say about the matter.

She had been dreaming of remodeling her bathroom herself — of taking out the tub and tiling all the walls so that cleaning the whole room could be arranged by spraying a hose and all the plumbing would be exposed outside the walls somehow so if they ever needed repairing again, it wouldn’t involve another complete undoing.

Some very high-end designers had designed it once in a magazine and she has been lusting after it ever since. Of course they had done it for a young and up and coming couple who had no end of money — but she had believed that with enough will and strength that she could do it for herself — someday. It would have been better to have done it sooner than this much later because uncooperative body parts were now impacting that scenario some — so the dream might have to change but only insomuch as to change how it gets done — earn enough money to pay someone else to do it. Maybe she can write a book because it doesn’t look to be like there are many other options left to make that kind of money — certainly not sewing and alterations and who would possibly consider hiring that gray lady in the mirror.

No one has to see you when you’re writing and you can be exactly who you want to in the pages of a novel.

Dreams have their own way of changing. At some points they just have to be given up completely.

There are millions and millions of people writing books or wanting to — are the odds of that success any better than winning the lotto — it doesn’t always seem to be a matter of talent. She was still “you can’t win if you don’t play” playing, so she might as well keep buying the idea of writing a novel. After all, she’d met him in a one-in-a-billion chance of meeting.

They’re all just numbers after all. Numbers that have as much chance of going this way as that.

And even though he’d come and gone like a monsoon flooding — sweeping in, pouring down, running over and leaving just as quickly as forming — and even though it was scarcely possible to remember how he had looked like the inertia-breaking superhero that he had ended up as being — nonetheless he had been.

So anything was possible — at least as possible as the changing of the weather. She might as well keep practicing — there was no way to know which way any of it would end up — if it would go this way or the other. Either way it might impact inertia and even put some or all of the other things in better or full agreement.

It was certainly better than doing nothing.

Sounds Like Addiction

Even though he had died some time ago and before that, changed shapes and was unidentifiable as such, he could still show up in dreams as the very one who had come with all of the elements for fitting all of the receptacles of love inside of her — the first time.

Death by chocolate.

“..to the depth and breadth and height..” Are there better words?

The third or fourth time that he parted from her, but the first very serious parting, she lost so many pounds she became a skeleton of her former self. That was one good thing about it. There might be others. It would be some time before she’d know.

“Sounds like addiction to me” the counselor said when he finally had exhausted his tolerance of listening to her rambling. “You have a lot of anxiety.” Anxiety can feel like a heart has been attacked.

That was really all her ears needed to hear. She went back a couple of times but only because he had asked for so little and his wisdom had been so great. If he hadn’t known those words to shock her heart back into rhythm, she was sure she would have died.

She would likely spend the rest of her life trying to gain the full measure of it’s clear and utter meaning. Her heart had been expanded and there were new receptacles that needed filling.

It is unknown if chocolate is a trigger or a simple warning of a migraine on its way — a thing the body craves from needing. It might even be that someone who has never known chocolate can crave it.

Adulteration by sugar, milk or pesticide might be the difference of it being more devil than a piece of heaven.

“Love is God.”

It is true that until one is touched and filled with the depth and breath and height, there is no real or confident knowing.

“God is love.”

Putting labels on a thing of such complexity seems useless and confining. Is it not better that the context be found by intuition than earthly roundup? He, it, she, they are in the margins she keeps trying to find her way to without help of external influence — not a thing or being.

ALL — alpha and omega are simple letters at the beginning and end of a string of symbols that make words that still need meaning for any real or lasting value — All still constructs of a grand and ever expansive collective conscience.

He was there again last night. She couldn’t get enough as he kept backing up or others he had known before showed up to try to steal him. Not unlike cocaine, unable to fix a thing.

“Sounds like addiction to me” rang again in her head. What lesson wasn’t learned?

Love is just a word too. Only when there are no and not six degrees of separation can the full music of all knowing be known.

 

 

 

No Darling Dear

“You have a dimply face, a tragic face with sadness all over it – it makes me want to take care of you” he said as he drew close to her and turned to poke the dimples he thought he was seeing in her face as if to fill them up. It was very soft and tender, the poking he was doing with his long and pointy nose yet it still gave her an uncomfortable feeling like she wanted to back away but she didn’t. He was very tall and she had gestured for him to come closer so that she could ask him if he was a genius or something because that dress he had sneaked in the pile of foundations fit her as if her body had been made for it. She had gone in looking for a bra, even though she doesn’t wear bras anymore but for some reason she wanted some support and something that would make her feel sexy. She went in with layers and layers of other things on and as she peeled them off and dropped them over her shoulders to hang on her waist so that she could try on the foundations, she kept hoping that the others in the room would leave. Sure enough, one by one, they did except for the tall man who was standing on the edge of the room with his back to her like a guard. When one last one just wouldn’t leave, he left too, dragging the other with him saying “let’s give her some privacy”.

Someone was there with her, another female, as she tried the things on and kept feeling more and more worthy of their fitting. Each article telling some part of herself to herself – her breasts were big enough, she wasn’t too fat, she could float and dance and feel happy. She was lovely.

She wanted the dress but imagined it was $500 and upon turning over the tag to read that it was $698 she said to herself “Not too bad at guessing.” Or was it the bra the tag was attached to and maybe the dress was $3000? It didn’t matter either way because she didn’t have enough for a strap but wanted to find a way to have at least one foundation and that dress.

The tall man was wearing something like a tuxedo and she started bombing him with questions, “Are you friends with the Vanderbilts? Do you know so and so, or so and so, or so and so?” She needed to figure out how he could be so intuitive and know exactly what would fit her and make her feel so good about herself. She started trying to neatly arrange all of the items that were no longer on her in an orderly fashion so that she could leave but by that time he and the Vanderbilts and all the other so and sos were sitting at a lavish dinner table in the next room eating.

The last man that the tall man had dragged out so she could have privacy came back in and got close to her and started trying to sell her something. The tall man left the table and came over to separate the salesman from her and then the two of them went off to wrestle with words and their bodies to decide something she had no clue about.

All that she did know was how perfectly that dress had fit her and how wonderfully sexy under it the foundations had let her feel. The tall man had brought those things to her as if he knew exactly. How could he have known? Under the dress and in the bra, she didn’t feel naked but didn’t feel dressed – she felt whole, a way she had never felt before. Years and years of trying to make things fit and nothing would. This had pleats and tucks in all the right places and hung on her with no more than the weight of a feather. Maybe she didn’t need the dress to own — perhaps it was enough that it had informed her of her wholeness. She was thinking that she loved that man in the tuxedo now.

Her shoulders started to ache enough to wake her up and it was already late. This must have been a good year for baby bird hatchings because they were in a loud chorus outside her open window trying to tell her it was a new day and that anything was possible again. As she tried to get the sleep out of her eyes, one of the kitties jumped up on the bed and started meowing. Reality was back.

The last time he had emailed her, he asked if she was tired yet of his daily calls and she replied, “No darling dear” which was just a little too close to “I think I love you” informing her that she needed to take a spoonful of temperance again — her emotions so untrustworthy and willing to betray.

Dreams are wonderful at sorting things out and filling dimples. She would think about that dress all day now and feel whole and light and happy. That was enough. Maybe she could make that dress. No, it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t need a dress to confirm what she was starting to know by now — that it all comes together just right in the end — at least if a dream has anything to say about it and that outside forces prevail to congeal it all.

She would have to trust that “Everything will be alright in the end. If it is not alright, it is not yet the end.”

 

 

Old Black Water

“I’m an alcoholic. Sometimes I’m tempted to have a drink. — But I never do.”

Dreams are weird. Terribly hard to describe. Maybe easier to make a movie to depict them — or a work of art.

Dali ~ The Persistence of Memory

Movies. She watches far too many of them but they are her way of staying sane — of feeling like she has company — of reminiscing feelings.

Not that reminiscing is a good thing, mind, but seems necessary at this time.

This time she is departed from loved ones — dogs, cats and most all of the people — family or considered family. It isn’t really loneliness. It is missing. Missing Mom’s house to go to and yard to play in while Mom cooks in the window above where she is playing. Missing sissy’s porch to sit on — of having a chat with her. Missing clipping Little Red’s fur coat with scissors and loving her the whole time. Not really missing picking up poop inside the house from Gertie’s accidents, but missing it just the same and Gertie’s sweet blind eyes. Missing seeing Tom at Safeway or at her front gate. Missing arguing with him or sharing agreement on topics of interest over a cup of senior coffee at Wendy’s.

They are all gone as are many of the people around town who have aged out and gone on too — people she had cleaned house or mended clothes for.

The little town is starting to feel too small. The City is starting to behave in ways she is fairly unhappy with. Maybe she is just noticing it because there is so little else to distract her.

She and Tom had talked about pooling resources and moving to New Mexico and whenever he was out on one of his vagabond trips he was assessing the culture and climate of wherever he was with her in mind. She had told him to look for an old abandoned motel with property that she could work on and they could convert to be a bed and breakfast or alternative housing unit. He had thought that might be a feasible idea — one that would be able to keep them still separated enough but meet each of their individual needs as well.

She knows in her heart that he would likely have abandoned her with the project and continued his vagabond habit but it was something that they could talk about and dream of and a way for them to consider not completely separating as he tried to find a way to leave her same town that he had long ago found way too small for his liking.

Tom is gone in the real sense now, and she has invested 16 years into trying to carve out her style of living. Though it seems to be going backwards, it is likely going full speed ahead. Even growing tomatoes has been a challenge, but such is the cycle of life. She had put out poisoned straw by mistake and things might simply be recovering from that. How can she leave it in such a state?

In her little carved out life, she has abandoned many things — TV, a washing machine, flushing her toilet, driving too much. She used to drive all the time whenever she needed to clear the cobwebs of her mind or sort them out. It wasn’t uncommon for her, back in the day, to set out on a driving expedition that would last for hours — maybe to Julian and back just to go and come. Julian was an even smaller town than where she is now but in her mind it had been huge. It had all the things she had dreamed of at one time, including a boy.

Image from the book, The Little Gardener ~ Emily Hughes

That boy liked horses and trouble and ended up marrying “a wonderful English girl”, who liked horses too, that he’d met while stationed in England. He’d been trying to survive the Air Force without being discharged dishonorably. Somehow the English girl must have factored into that survival.

He’d come home between getting out and getting the English girl moved with her horses from England to his little town. “You never know what might happen in that time.” he’d written in the blue letter.

She’d traveled out to visit him in the in-between time of horses and marriage and before she left he said, “If I thought you might commit suicide, I won’t marry her.”

She cried all the way home, listening to The Doobie Brothers, Black Water.

“Old black water, keep on rollin'”

She was affected for years whenever she heard that song. But she wasn’t going to commit suicide and she wasn’t going to lie either. That couldn’t have turned out good.

Years and years she’d make that round, that trek to Julian and back. Often she wouldn’t even stop — just drive through and back home. Once in awhile, she’d get out and walk around — trying to grasp the feelings of why it had all seemed like so much.

“Why had she done that?” she wondered. She figured it was a reminder of her own ability to survive in spite of loving a place or thing or boy. All those years ago, driving home crying, wondering how she’d survive, but she had.

Now to reminisce, because Julian is too far away in space and time, and because she doesn’t drive too much or have TV, she watches movies on DVD. Lately she found one with Tommy Lee Jones and hadn’t heard of it but figured if he was in it, it must be good and it was. Good enough anyway. Good enough to help her remember things she’d thought or thinks she’d like to have had or still have in her little, small town life.

In The Electric Mist, Tommy plays a non-drinking alcoholic detective. He apparently has been married to the same woman for years and has had a happy life with her — things she wishes she’d had or could have.

In the movie, Tommy is given a glass of iced tea that he doesn’t know is laced with LSD. He has hallucinations much like dreams that can’t be explained. The hallucinations correlate to events happening in his investigation, kind of leading him in a sense. Levon Helm plays in it too and he is another one of those people she misses that have gone on except in her mind or in a movie.

Her dreams lead her too. What are dreams except for the mind’s way of coping with or correlating life’s awake events?

Movies can be very much like dreaming. Movies suffice to bridge spaces left by boys who married girls with horses and the newer ones who fail to follow through or are yet to come. They help manifest the feelings of old of how the dream was schemed and attempted to be mapped and of a course that may still be able to be kept, with or without a boy. Of course, all the while waiting she hasn’t really been waiting.

Today on her walk she thought and thought like always. When she started out from home, it seemed so far away to the finish line, like so much drudgery.

We start out life that way, thinking things are so far away — like Christmas as a child, waiting for the next time Santa comes. Before we know it, we’re out of high school and upset about a boy who married an English girl. Suddenly we’re retired and walking up the last leg of a two-mile trek around a small town we feel stuck in and that boy divorced that girl in a few short years and who knows what he’s doing now.

She had been walking with her head down, watching her feet like in a trance when suddenly she looked up. It was the last little leg and up a steep hill. It was so gorgeous. The wild shrubs were gleaming, some with flowers already, in the back light of the Sun. The sky was crystal clear and blue as blue can be. The air was crisp, just right. She’d been looking at her old sneakers and the crummy old concrete beneath them all the while she could have been looking at the beauty before her. Of course she hadn’t been looking at her feet all along — but trying to get that last leg done and finally home, she had forced herself to focus in a methodical, mechanical way. It was starting to feel like drudgery.

Wishing life away.

She kept thinking about that movie and how Tommy’s character quit drinking and stayed sober. His friend, on the other hand had continued to drink and spent his life in misery. Being drunk is just another way of wishing life away.

Now when she checks out at the grocery, while everyone behind her is fidgeting and grumbling and wondering why the manager doesn’t put more cashiers in their stations so they can hurry off to somewhere, she tells the cashier, “No hurry, no worry.” She can see that they are stressed. “How is your day going so far?”

All too often one will say, “Oh, thank God it’s almost over!” She remembers feeling that way and of wishing time would pass and she could leave to be herself and not some robot drudging along.

“Why did you try to start a business when your house was bought and paid for?” her friend asked lately. The friend who spent over 30 years in the same County job, most of it drinking or drunk.

“I wanted to be Me.” she answered. Her friend still couldn’t get it. “Yeah, but your house was bought and paid for.”

“My payment is way less than your rent.” she reminds. “And a landlord can’t force me out or increase the rent. He can’t tell me not to have pets or dig in the yard. I can paint my walls any color I want and the interest is deductible.”

“Yeah, but your house was bought and paid for.” she imagines her friend is still thinking.

She doesn’t often wonder about that boy from Julian — as important as he was. She does sometimes wonder how she pulled herself away, as much as she wanted to stay. It was simply that her intuition was stronger than the inebriation and self-preservation had taken over.

“Old Black Water”, drunk on love she would remember it as. Puppy love.

She’s glad that she didn’t get more of her father’s drinking genes but got a healthier dose of the sober ones of her mother. “Do people have a choice on getting drunk or staying sober?” Her father didn’t seem to.

Dreams, movies, memories, are they means of escape or a way to keep on rollin’?  Seems it depends on the user. “Mississippi moon, won’t you keep on shinin’ on me?” She’ll keep using that memory for healing. That boy, he was a good thing. He was her first lesson in being strong.

That’s why she had liked to drive to Julian. It was a way of remembering strength. Digging in the dirt of her mother’s yard is just a movie in her mind now, it is a reminder of the days of planning and scheming to have a yard of her own and of how strong she had been to get there and comforting to remember the support her mother gave along the way.

“The only things in this life that you really regret are the risks you didn’t take.” ~ Grumpy Old Men — it puts her to sleep at night –comfort and wisdom to sleep on. They are old friends preserved on film.

She guesses that she could put on the movie her mother left of her and her sisters’ growing years, but she thinks that would likely end in tears.

“Yeah, keep on shinin’ your light
Gonna make everything
Pretty mama, gonna make everything all right
And I ain’t got no worries
‘Cause I ain’t in no hurry at all”

Is that boy still alive she wonders…?

 

 

Good On Paper

Day before yesterday, she took a drive down an old country road to try to clear some cobwebs in her mind. Things had gotten murky in the onslaught of an emotional deluge. A completely unexpected one. Out of the blue.

The road was lined with giant cottonwood trees, beautiful and majestic, works of art even. They were delightful and steadfast, anchored well to the ground, their leaves fluttering and seeming dainty for such massive structures.

The sky was gorgeous, clear and sunny. There were no cars on the road. It was only about seven miles or so one way and when she got to where she was going, she took an adjacent road to course a path that she was familiar with and that would evoke the feelings she was on the hunt for. She was full of emotions, but they were muddled and she needed to order them in some fashion that they wouldn’t upend her. She couldn’t put her finger on what was setting such disease.

Days of old, she could count on her sister to help, but her sister was gone now except for in memory. Sometimes it helped to drive by where she had been and where they had been together.

Touch. Is it to feel the pressure of another person’s skin on yours. Can words touch. Can one touch without touching?

It was an aching feeling that she was having. Something had touched her deep inside, like a bug had gotten in. She wanted to reach for his hand, but his hand was in her mind or twelve hundred miles away.

What was this aching feeling of wanting words to manifest in structures other than sentences, off of the pages they were on? Why did words suddenly not seem like enough? There were so few of them, but also so many and they had all been crammed in the space of the blink of an eye.

She now wanted them to be not only good on paper but alive in a more profound and concrete way.

There had been a bunch of words written, but they could just as easily have been words that she had written in a story. This was what was so unnerving, that she could have written the words as answers to herself, perfect responses to questions that she had or things that she was thinking; but she hadn’t written them, he had.

He sounded so very good on paper and they had each contributed to causing this to escalate. “Damn the torpedoes!”, he had said. And she had let them be damned, at least for a little while, even though something was nagging at her dreadfully. She was expecting shoes to drop and it wouldn’t be long before he said, “…obviously the odds are long that things, even as they’ve developed, will ever get off the ground.” And then right after that, in the same letter, “Being able to sit next to you, talk for hours, hold hands, laugh, look into your eyes, be comfortably “in love”, and let aging natures take their course from there are thoughts that wake me up in the middle of the night. But all of that is because of what goes on between your ears.”

Damn those torpedoes. It was time to back away.  There were little dogs involved.

Would more words quell the aching. It didn’t seem so. It seemed that the words were behaving badly by this time.

The symptom was of lovesickness. Why was she aching with lovesickness?

“Lovesickness refers to an informal affliction that describes negative feelings associated with ongoing relationships, or the absence of a loved one. It can manifest as physical as well as mental symptoms.”

Time to start the analysis, the diagnosis, as was her method of rebounding from a slight or mental concussion. It was time to try to heal.

What was she loving? What was negative about it? How was it absent?

She was loving a bunch of words. Oh sure, there was someone putting the words to paper, so to speak. Was it a figment of her imagination?

Yes, she would decide to think of it that way; something she had conjured. It was in a dream or a story she was making up in her mind. The whole thing certainly didn’t seem to be of any more use than that. Fodder for a story. It couldn’t become really real.

It was different than the dreams of late that were waking her up at night. Dreams of terrorists shooting her in the head and of her continuing to walk long enough to conquer those who were there to kill her. She had stared the gun in the face as it shot at her and hit, going through her brain and she could feel her essence leaving, but she had managed to keep going until the last of the lot was down on the ground before her. And she managed all the killing with her hands and no weapons. Her sister was somewhere in the periphery as usual. Dreams can’t be explained. But all of the dreams she was having along with this other wonderful paper dream were of a nature of surviving long enough to conquer or quell those who would try to or accidentally do her harm.

Would she survive all the wonderful words on virtual paper that had suddenly spelt a dream out on them? Perhaps not. Time would tell. Certainly. At any rate, passion had been awakened anew. That damn feeling of being touched deep down inside had arrived again, unexpectedly and profoundly. After so very long away, it was a lot, a lot unnerving. She couldn’t quite remember how to survive it.

A day alone on holiday might do the trick. Just in the nick of time, Thanksgiving. Everyone else with others or someone. She didn’t mind being alone, not one bit. She didn’t mind being with others or another either; but this time, it would be alone and likely just what she needed.

Real love is not a search to combat loneliness. Real love is to transform loneliness into aloneness, to help the other. If you love a person, you help that person experience the completeness of aloneness. You don’t try to fill them up and complete them by your presence. You want them to not be in need of you.

When a person is totally free, then out of that freedom, sharing is possible. You give, not as a need, not as a bargain, but because you are overflowing with love.

It seems to be the consensus of experts that the best way to overcome lovesickness is to stay busy.

Busy it would be. Busy creating. Busy putting more words on paper but this time to herself, for herself, to heal herself.

It had come upon them suddenly. He said he felt the same. It wasn’t supposed to go that way. They were supposed to be friends like she and Tom had been. That was what he liked so much about her and all she had thought she would want from him too.

7. Are you tempted to say, “I love you”?

“I can say this without reservation: I want you to be as happy as possible ALWAYS even if, sadly, I were in no way part of it.

I HAVE to start my day, Circe!!!!!”

The fair-locked goddess Circe was bathing in the ocean, along with the water nymphs, when Poseidon, the Olympian god of the sea, felt her magic touch and her beauty. He fell in love with Circe and took her as his lover.

We can’t seem to help who we ‘fall in love’ with and it usually happens accidentally. We see ourselves in the other perhaps the same way Narcissis saw love in his own reflection often failing the same as he and Echo.

Words and reflections, like a magic act; smoke and mirrors. Was that all it was?

One day Juno was seeking her husband, who, she had reason to fear, was amusing himself among the nymphs. Echo by her talk contrived to detain the goddess till the nymphs made their escape. When Juno discovered it, she passed sentence upon Echo in these words: “You shall forfeit the use of that tongue with which you have cheated me, except for that one purpose you are so fond of—reply. You shall still have the last word, but no power to speak first.”

This nymph saw Narcissus, a beautiful youth, as he pursued the chase upon the mountains. She loved him and followed his footsteps. O how she longed to address him in the softest accents, and win him to converse! but it was not in her power.

Echo and Narcissus (John William Waterhouse, 1903, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)

Something was in the way.

Distance, timing, fear. Two little dogs.

It wasn’t physical distance any longer that was between them. She had backed away, gone back into her shell. Things he had started to say, attitudes she could feel he was developing pushed her away.  She could see that he was blaming her. Trouble was, she was free, he was not. Once she fully realized this, she knew that what had been was all that there could ever be.

If you don’t intend to fall in love, another person’s status is of no nevermind. When you accidentally do, it matters greatly. Time to back away. There is no where to go. She would not be any kind of mistress, not that he was asking.

He had called her Circe. Circe was a sorceress; some say a ‘good witch’. Did he think that she had put a spell on him? Was he falling in love? Could he? Was he free to?

It isn’t fair to blame a man, even if he’s married or otherwise engaged. They can’t help falling anymore that the other can. It can happen accidentally, free or not.

She didn’t blame him. She was simply sorry. Sorry for the circumstances and grateful at the same time for him honoring her distance. Sorry that this time, another time, it wouldn’t be more than good on paper. On paper, they were perfect it seemed. That could be good enough. It would have to be.

“Will love ever come again?” She didn’t know, but she was happy to have been reminded that there could be someone so deep and thoughtful, so smart and clever, someone that could challenge her, someone that wanted to look and look deeply at her and want to know her.  Seems that is mostly what everyone wants, to know and to be known. That was the closest she’d ever come to perfection. That was encouraging and even enough to match The Bridges of Madison County kind of loving..

“a brief affair that is never sordid but instead one of two soul mates who have met too late.”