Ties

Dana spoke of loss and darkness in her life.  I don't  know who  she lost.  A child, or her parents, or a husband...I wish I had been there for her.  Several of my dreams suggested it would be her father who finally brings her to speak with me.   How do I win her trust?  How do I show her that she can speak with me on things that are deeply personal?  I'm wanting tonight to offer something of my own that is personal, that is painful or private.  I did that all the time in the no-longer-extant former blog  years ago in which I could post anonymously.  But not knowing Dana's heart or her story I don't know if anything I could offer feels right.   I was suicidal once,  only weeks before Dana and I began to write each other in '88.  Should I write about that?  It's personal and private, is the point - that I can open up about it... but I don't think it's relevant.  I don't know that anything would be.  I'm not making a  sympathy play, that's not it.  It's an offering I want to make, not a sacrifice.  There have been a few occasions where talking about my depression openly online  helped strangers to get through the same thing.  Sharing makes a difference, even here.  Maybe, if I could find something like that, even if it's utterly unrelated to anything Dana has struggled through...maybe just the effort would mean something.  I'm just at a loss as to what to write about.  I'm still trying my best not to feel anything.  Just coast.  Just float.

Still don't know if I have to go to New York.

I took mom's bedclothes out to the  garage tonight, ready to donate to a place that helps women trying to escape abuse.  Seeing them in a heap like that being discarded hurt more than most of what I've been having to lose.  I held the blankets and cried some.  I keep  feeling as if mom is just gone out of town.  It isn't sinking in because when it threatens to it overwhelms.  I made a peanut butter pie a week ago and realized it's the last one I'll ever make in this house.  I  tried it with brown sugar this time.  Wasn't strong enough to make a difference but either way mom wasn't here to try it.

I held mom's hand in the hospital.  For a long time.  She had wanted me home, not there,  so I left the hospital.  I was told later what time she passed.  It  was during the  ride home. During that ride, at the hour I was later told of, I'd had a sudden and vivid sense memory for a moment of holding her hand. 
The  one sister that lives here moved in about two years ago to help take care of my parents.  She's not  openly hostile to me most of the time but doesn't mind making things as difficult as possible, throwing up new roadblocks to me sorting my stuff while pushing me to get it done and passive-aggressively cutting me down...insisting we sell the house before I can ready a place to go is the worst part of it, scares the shit out of me and she knows it (doesn't care).  The tension is there and some days worsens.  The night after one of those damned 'family meetings' I dreamt that we had  caused mom to retreat to her bed crying.  We did that, we caused that.

Mom had had two children by her  second husband before me.  I was the one that lived.  I had never heard of them from her and never knew until many years later.  One, a girl,  was told me by one of my sisters.  The loss had put mom in a  clinic.  The other I learned of by accident when I was looking through some magazines being thrown out.  Hidden among them had been a birth certificate for a brother born not much more than a year before I was.  I never wanted to hurt mom by asking so I put the certificate back in hiding and soon it was gone.  To my lasting shame I can't remember the name on the paper, what my brother's name was.  I've never asked anyone else in the family and never will.

I remember my first Christmas - it had to be, because I remember not being able to walk, just crawl.  I recall the living room in Vallejo, the tree towering in the corner with the blown-glass onion-shaped ornaments in all colors.  I have an impression (but is it mis-shapen by what I have learned since?)  of the many smiling adults who kept urging me to play with an  arrangement of toys on the floor, and being reluctant to do so because I knew they weren't mine but belonged to another child.  I was the only child there.

I  had a nephew Tony,  who was a year older than me.  he died a few years ago after a troubled life of drug abuse and homelessness.  I used to believe that he had visited us down there, but everyone swore up and down that he never left Portland.  See, I thought Tony had been with us on this one occasion I remember of my father  taking me to play at a park in Vallejo.  I  remember a structure with holes and tubes to climb through, which I and the other boy with me really enjoyed.  He was only a little older than I was, about a year.  I felt he was family somehow - why not, as he rode in the car home with us?  But everyone swears that I was the only child on that trip. 

Mmmff.  None of these are what I'm looking for.  Personal struggles over hard choices.  I've only two of those and I'm not free to write either of them - they involve other people's private stories.

Not sure just now what other memories to write about.  There are many good ones.  Some  from the Franklin Green Room,  the one time I felt truly part of a family, like I belonged.  Walking the three miles home in a gentle rain after a rehearsal, one of the most blissfully peaceful experiences I've ever had.  Or going across the back campus for crinkle-cut fries at Dairy Queen in the evening when I was on the makeup crew.  Falling in love for the first time when I never questioned that it wasn't my place to even speak to her (Kris), or the second time when she (Diane S.) was the first girl who ever spoke to me like it mattered to her that I was the one listening.  Or discovering sex, or always feeling like the perpetual outsider.  I have memories about Dana.  I've shared most of them before, some of them here and some under pseudonyms.  I would like the chance to share them with her personally.   Even the awkward or bad ones.  I'd wish to share hers.  Speaking literally, I wonder if I ever appear in her dreams, and whether she remembers them when she wakes in the morning. 

Hope I fall asleep tonight.  Started watching Backstairs at the White House, 1979 miniseries now on YouTube.  Me and mom watched it together in '79.  It holds up well.



NOT Dana:

Quick ballpoint doodle while I was waiting on a job interview.  Not meant to look like anyone in particular but a few elements of Dana did appear.  The mouth might be a little more...Joanna Lumley, New Avengers era?  She often had that expression.

(edit, 11/25)  Hypnagogic flash of Dana yesterday evening, I won't describe.  Could be imagination, could be her reacting to the PM I just sent.  She reacted badly, but I don't know if she blames me or herself. I needed her to reassure me about her intentions, that she's not shut the door again.

(edit)(sent.  a few hours later, hypnagogic flash of Dana in what looks like a park or playground, seen from across the grounds.  She has her hair long, straight, and copper, wears a baggy black sweatshirt, and tan pants.  She has two or three female friends with her, dressed the same. They are trying to restrain her as she is in hysterics, crying and raging, seems like she wants to hit or destroy something but there's nothing to destroy. don't know if this was psychic or imagination.)
(the above flash was on the 25th.  Dana was on FB on the 25th, she posted and she blocked me from messaging.)

'I Bet My Life'.  No, Dana, you bet mine.  And I lost.  Put this right. I don't want you hurt.  But you're still bent on hurting me - over a mistaken belief you've built a world on - and instead of making amends you want to keep hurting me, justify hurting me, twist it into something noble...and you actually want and expect me to be okay with it.  And that's fucked.  I wonder if you see just how selfish  and cruel that is.  It's not okay.  It'll never be okay.  Or forgiven, if you let it stand.   How could you think I'd just sit and take that?


That vision, I think Shiva just put a finger on Dana's world.  She was counting on me playing along instead of having to treat me like a real human being.

So her typo, 'free me', I know what that meant now.  She had no intention of trying to be a friend.  I can't free her, because the cage isn't what she thinks it is. She made that cage herself, it's her own fear of talking to me.  I could move to Siberia and she'd never be free of it.  Only when she confronts her fear will she be free of that cage.