I woke with a start this morning unhinged from any framework of reality. I was large-bodied and liquid, a turbulent ocean of self. Dark waves crashing, churning, salt water burning. The sea of me drowned, lungs collapsed, choking with violence. In that thinness between night and day, between dreamstate and waking, I gasped for water or air, not knowing which would revive me. Instead, I discovered myself on land--more accurately, in bed--with eyes open, my heart still pounding. Panic acts as one hell of an alarm clock. Sitting up, I fluffed my pillow and snuggled back into a sandwich of bedding. After a few seconds, I turned on my left side. Back to the right. Flat on my back. Lauren breathed quietly, just inches from me. The dog between us chased squirrels in her sleep, kicking her legs back and forth against my side. Theo and Todd snoozing. All the world must be asleep except me and the rhinos in the room above us. Ah! The joys of a shared room at the Ronald McDonald House. Just close the eyes for five more minutes.
A violet glow within the room tickled my eyelids, shut tight against the dawn, and suggested an all-too-early hour. Try as I might, I could not find my way back to dreamland. I lay in bed and let Monkey Mind take over. A million items on my life’s To Do list competed for attention, adding to the morning’s anxiety pile up. Bleary eyed and exhausted, I returned to water and let raw emotion wash over me, drench the bedsheets, spill onto the floor.
These waves, I know, are just another part of life’s messy disjunction—the rupturing of an otherwise orderly, mediocre life. Emotion gives life an extraordinary quality. A luminous energy. And this emotion does not whisper or speak today; it bellows: “Wake up! You are alive.” It is unpleasant, but the wake up I need. How long have I been stuck swirling in the doldrums? How long have I been sleepwalking through my days? Appointments, procedures, and experiences (physical and emotional) that I want to remember, but can’t unless I write them down. It seems too much--too much that is painful and raw and right now.
Embracing the whole chaotic mess of a life lived is a way to be free, to reside in what my writer friend Dodie Bellamy calls “that incendiary in-between state, to court anxiety, instability, glorious fuckedupness.” Anything else is stagnation, monotony, murk. As I look around me at the rising waters, threatening to engulf me once again, I decide to embrace the flotsam and jetsam along with clear water. I don’t know whether I’ll float, swim, tread water, or become the ocean today. I don’t know whether I’ll be close to shore or out at sea. What I do know is that life’s ebb and flow is never dull. I’m hoping that I’ll capture some of that here.
