Woke in the middle of the night. It wasn’t good. Sweating, stomach upset. There are reasons to keep some things to yourself, lots of different reasons. Stress, never let them see you sweat. Stoicism, life is supposed to be hard deal with it. Compassion; if you’re fucked up it’ll scare the bejesus out of everyone else hanging on by a thread. Pride, can’t let the world know it’s getting to you. A million reasons.
They catch you off guard, if you’re lucky they do it in your sleep. Even if you aren’t lucky, those are played out in our dreams; shrinks and psychics have built an industry from your dreams. I don’t know that it was a dream that had me fumbling through the dark last night, my dreams aren’t an industry, that factory has been closed and even the rubble hauled off. I’d been using an electric wax warmer as a light. A few nights ago I woke up with it still on, fumbled to turn it off and knocked hot wax to the hard wood floor. So last night I stumbled through the dark.
This isn’t how it was supposed to go down, none of this, but it’s not a bad way of going down. When you are used to crisis you get flexible on plans, keep your eye on the prize and float down the flood around any fallen branches in the way. Slow crisis I’m not so good with. A slow crisis has no adrenaline rush. You have time to second guess, to over-think, to count the tiles in the ceiling. To think of song lyrics.
The sun is shining through my shades. The only windows in this attic have an eastern exposure. It’s why my last memories of living here are morning memories; the five o’clock train, crickets, the slant of sunshine and dew-fat grass. It’s around one degree Fahrenheit right now. The false sun will decay. False has a much shorter shelf life than real. False and real are constructs, contrivances, made of the same stuff as pride, compassion, stoicism and stress. Mostly everything is made of space or places in between, down to the very atoms, mostly it’s space in between.
We have this pressing need as human beings to fill the space with things, things real and imagined, real and false, and most of all feelings; I like this space, I don’t like that space, that space over there is just ok.
I laid back down and went to sleep again. I wasn’t exactly rested in the morning and not exactly groggy. So I’m left with this, an entry about space in between though that’s not where I had planned to go. No one plans to go there and yet it’s where we always are. One of the more satisfying things about fiction, a complete story, is that there is a beginning a middle and an end and the space between is filled with words, even the smallest most meaningless gesture in a book has some significance or it wouldn’t be there. In the course of our own the lives the beginning fades, we fear the end, and we have a very hard time being in the moment, the perpetual middle.
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons --- TS Eliot
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