The Unglamorous Life

Roi calls but no longer leaves messages. It helps me pretend he's never coming home, though I do wish he would answer my email about when I can expect his return with our two week house guests: a man, a cat, and a 2 month old puppy. I know it's coming soon, but suddenly need to know the exact date, the exact hour so I can prepare myself for the coming intrusion. Laughter and meals and chores and stories and petting and admiration of another's animals will be expected. Instead I will probably lock myself in my upstairs office. I'm not sure if I'll be protecting myself, or our guests. Already I've imagined dozens of scenarios over which I snap -- or rather, show that I'm in the exact place that I'm in and the laundry list of reasons for it.

The therapies, the conventional and the not-accepted-by-science/pharmaceuticals, have lifted me up out of the black void, but I am still far from being stitched together. This is partly because one doesn't recover from being splintered over-night, and partly fierce refusal to carry on as I have picking up pieces and patching them together like a teacup dropped to the floor and crazy-glued back together so that life can go on and tea can be served.

The refusal part, it would be bold and glamorous of me if it were of my will, but it's not. It just simply is. There are not enough pieces left to glue together. There is not enough glue that can patch up the holes or make anything that resembles a me. It just can't be done. There is nothing to do with these shards but to throw them into a melting pot, let them churn and boil and surface and soften and dissolve.

I am breaking and becoming at once. 

Last night as I drifted off after hours of restless tossing I heard a man's whisper in my ear. I was not yet dreaming, or rather I was beginning to, but the whisper was outside the dream. "When are you going to go?" I jolted awake and wildly wondered if this was some new form of dreaming I had not ever experienced, if something in neurofeedback had somehow caused it. Exhausted, I drifted again and this time heard a woman, "it was meant to be a surprise". Heart beating violently now, frozen in the bed, in my dark room I began to fear I was at last going mad. I had been dreaming of a giant reptilian tail scraping around a corner behind a doorway, but the whispers were not in the dream, not part of it. The sound was outside the dream, outside my head.

Which wild phenomenon should I label this? A simple trick of the mind because I've been letting someone play around with my brainwaves? Submerged memories coming to surface? Echoes of the subconscious? Spirits? "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato"? Or old-fashioned madness? 

I am breaking and becoming at once. 

I don't know how long I lay there searching the dark, searching my mind, with the little table fan whirring cheerily next to my head, the cat curled peacefully in the corner. I don't know the exact moment I fell into dreamless sleep. I only know that I did sleep, and in the morning there was sun. 

P.S. It might seem that first whisper, "when are you going to go" is an obvious call from the subconscious, yet the feeling I got from the words was in the present tense. As in, what minute or hour was I going to leave that night.