it's not supposed to happen like this

C has been in my dreams over the last several weeks.  In one she was across the street looking at me when I saw her.  I waved to indicate I saw her and see if she saw me, too.  She waved back.  In the other I woke with her, she was talking to me.  It was easy, happy. 

The dreams have tapered off over these last couple of years, but they return once in a while and now that we're out of touch I don't know what -if anything- they mean.  There's this hole that slowly fills with the days events.  In time.  Once the day gets underway. 

In the last week, there's been a snag.  I met a woman.  She's smart, fast-thinking, confident, funny, really kind, and has curves.  There's a lot to figure out here.  Because am I drawn to her because she reminds me of...?  There's more that's problematic.  How much to include, here?  I'll say it like this- first, nothing can ever come of it and second, I am more exposed to her than she is to me.  And she seems to really like me.  There's something personal in the way we communicate and our reltionship is strictly professional. 

Yes, even to my blind ass the similarities are striking. 

I'm heartened that I'm capable of this feeling.  Chemistry.  Love.  Strength or something like it.  I wonder (again, as I used to) if I could perhaps feel this with someone without the barriers.  I can't stand to think I can only get here when protected by the glass vault that prohibits any action by either party. 

Interestingly, it's made me miss C.  A little too much.  Imagining if she called to say hi.  Hanging out even casually.  Or not casually.  The whole heteronormative thing.  A date.  Flowers.  Her laughing, then smiling, then sliding her hand into mine. 

More time, right?  I need to give it a little more time.  That's all.  I hope.

bareknuckle

I tell myself that things are settled but there's some sense in me that that's not quite true.  A lingering.  Is there something left to say?  Some hope not yet extinguished?  I return often to this trying to find some peace with how we left it.

Framed one way, it came as a final test.  Defining a boundary for myself, and respecting it.  Whatever the cost.  The cost is so high though.  And I circle back and put my fingers on the keys lightly thinking heavily.  I lose and gain my nerve in anthems and ballads. 

I try to outthink my way back.  An old party trick.  There are other frames, other mattes, I could make a collage of them.  Some offer a portal, true.  But at the threshold I still have to answer the koan of the first frame: Am I letting love or missing love erase my boundaries?  There's rage there, in that last question.  And so I wander away again, rapped upon the back of both hands with a ruler.  Stung through to the shoulderblades.

This is my lesson and I continue to learn it, slowly.  Angrily.  Stubbornly.

finis coronat opus

I decided to get this down because I may one day wonder what happened. 

Since we quit working together, I have slowly let go.  Not all the way but some.  And she comes back.  As a slow blur separating itself from the background.  As if she comes into focus.  And I get to have that.  A sort of shimmering connection at once near and far. 

We emailed some brief updates and it was so lovely.  Fun.  Light.  Then she said she was going to be in town and asked about seeing each other.  When I replied yes, she pushed against the offer.  This pattern is the third time.  Ease and fun, notion of seeing each other, push and formality.  And I bristle at the change in tone.  It raises uncomfortable questions.  We devolve into semantics around what we want and see as a healthy way to stay in touch. 

Last time I acquiesced, thinking we just needed time to chill into a new way of being.  Now, closing in on a year and a half and us repeating this. 

I feel held down.  Splayed.  Forced into a vulnerability that feels wrong.  Out of proportion.  Inappropriate.  But she keeps saying she doesn't want anything to change.  Needs our relationship to stay the same.  But things did change.  And I need to change with them. 

And when I wrote it all out, explaining it as best I could, she seemed to think I wrote it hot or mad.  Like the time I called her beautiful, it just comes across so different than how I heard it in my mind's voice.  Usually I'm good at conveying my inner tone but as we lose this thing, maybe we losing that, too.  Or maybe it was her heat or anger she heard me through.  I don't know.  Something was way off.

We each left the ball in the others' court, I think.  I have so many feelings.  But, I'm all out of words.

in with the old

I have made progress with turning things around.  I didn't get up swinging, but I did get up.  A stuttering switching of places with the silent witness.  The world other-worldly then.  There is a place inside, a round cushion, the light down low.  The eyes are a window.  A head count and we are all here.  Who is that breathing?  Is the body, too, an Other?  As time is the fourth dimension in space-time, so then is the body a separate sameness?  There is much I don't understand. 

I am profoundly sad and also anxious.  I learned -unexpectedly- that head trauma causes tinnitus.  When people find out I have it, they tend to ask me about or chastise me for loud music.  I listen to folk and jazz/big band music primarily.  Some pop & oldies in the car.  More often nothing at all.  And I avoid headphones as they impart a sense that something is happening that I cannot hear coming.  So I doubt music had a part in it.  When I heard this in a tangent on a science show that's about other types of stuff, I stopped cold. 

Other stuff too.  A death in the family.  I sprained my wrist.  Work is changing.  Summer's arrival is changing my schedule in several way.    My ex forgot one of my kids for hours for the fifth or sixth time.  My son got hit by a car.  The list goes on and on.  And I know that really things are ok - not great not terrible and it will get both better and worse in all kinds of ways.  I know. 

My nervous system is shot and I need a moment (like a few days) of nothing going on.  But then again, once I wouldn't have even known that.  I'd have been swept out to sea using some old pattern as a wake board back to shore.  Or, on second thought, maybe I am doing that with writing.  Somehow it still helps. 

synchronicity

I got a text from the young redhead guy I saw a few times back when I began sleeping with men again.  It was utterly shocking, as if he was writing to a completely different person.

He flirted and I flirted back.  I wondered at myself about this response.  The internal and also the decision, the motions of my fingers, my sense of obliging him, how it all fit together.  Also how odd the timing is, how perfect in a sense.

That is, once upon a time this would have been exactly perfect timing, in terms of my mood or rage or pain.  I haven't heard from him in years and I haven't had a severe bout like this in years.  These things all feel connected.

I'm working hard to turn this corner or to hold on until this corner turns me. Back. Toward my self.

Snuffed out candle, wick still smoldering under the stream of smoke, and there is another me striking match after match.  Holding vigil.  Well.  Trying to.

The scene is unchanging.  Seconds pass.  Minutes.  Sit with them. Feel that? The urgency growing.  It's desperation.  The dark crowds in and I want the light. To push it back.  Before I lose my fear of the dark.

This repetitive trying, caught somewhere between earnest and obsessed.  Maybe the difference is just a matter of scale.  Even so sometimes that's all you've got.

That and the dwindling matches.

gravity

I have taken a tumble and I don't seem to find my way out.  It's been a few weeks, now.  I'd hoped it was maybe the weather which perks up a bit but turns back to fallish, winterish, and worse.  It's nearly June, now, and gray wet and in the fifties most always.

Those bony fingers have come for me.  Up my shirt and down my spine.  I cannot always tell anxiety from depression, so quick to give way inside my head.  I had two panics with shaking and everything, both followed by the abyss.  Can they arise together?  Some kind of yin and yang?

I think I can hold out for this to break.  Though I can feel a list coalescing in the back of my mind.  A somber laundry list.  But my energy is sparse, mostly.  When the rage comes I am most at risk, but I've been able to navigate the strong gravity away, and away when that happens.

I'm making some changes to my diet and exercise routine.  Carbs can help mood.  Moving my workout indoors since the weather is so shitty.  I'm hoping writing will help.  I've scarcely written in a year.  Make plans with some friends.  I didn't talk to or write anyone for days.  Like, literally anyone.  I need to go through the motions.  Maybe these and a break in the drear will begin to move things back.  Otherwise I'm down to the only thing left- medication.