Speeding Train

“wanting the tight buds of my loneliness
to swell and split, not die in waiting.
It was why I rushed through everything,
why I tore at the perpetual gauze
between me and the stinging world,”

From “Marijuana” by Chase Twichell

Every now and then, I get this awful feeling that I’m on a speeding train. I forgot to check the destination before I boarded, and now, I can’t remember where it was I intended to go. Chances are at some point I was impatient to get there, but now? And what if, despite my best intentions, I boarded the wrong train?

These are speeding train days. I’m working a full time job, handling an internship on the side, building a relationship with the Photographer, and trying to convince myself that I’m headed towards a future that will be everything it’s supposed to be, in which all the many facets of my complicated, unique self will manage to find their expression in the world and stop clawing at me for attention.

I can’t remember when I learned that it’s impossible to bring a vision unique and whole into the world. Whatever the story, poem, image or vision is in the abstract, it can’t enter time and space in that pure form. When I’m in a good mood, I think of it as giving the world a chance to contribute, to collaborate with me. When I’m not in a good mood, I’m not sure it’s worth it bringing anything out of its abstract perfectness. That’s when I get ambivalent about the train and where it’s going.

Michael Meade says, when it feels like there’s no time, you have to go to eternity to get some. For me, that means closing my eyes, forgetting the destination, and remembering that even the speeding train passes through individual moments that can be experienced, here and now.

 

 

Phone Dream

I dreamed that a friend of mine called me to tell me she was having a baby. I found it odd because she just had one six months ago. I was doing the math in my head to figure out if this was even possible. I acted happy for her, so as not to offend her. What business of mine was it anyway; if she wanted to have another baby right away, against the rules, let her. Who am I to judge?

Then I realized that the friend calling me was, in fact, deaf, and couldn’t possibly be having this conversation with me over the phone anyway. I decided to ask her about this, but she was talking to her husband in the background, and I couldn’t get her attention. Well, I thought, that’s just annoying. So I hung up the phone.

Doodle

When we were younger, my brother, The Deacon, could not pronounce Aunt Judy’s name. It turned into “Aunt Doody.” For obvious reasons, this was turned into Aunt Doodle, and the name stuck. I was probably seven or so before I realized Doodle was not her real name.

Last week, Aunt Doodle died rather unexpectedly of cancer we didn’t know she had. So over Labor Day weekend, my family and I converged on Macon, GA, where she lived with her husband, for the funeral and for some much needed family time together. Her kids and grandkids all lived nearby. We spent the long weekend picking scuppernongs from the vines out back of their house, playing with the little ones, and waiting for my oldest cousin’s wife, who was pregnant and about to pop, to go into labor.

Death is always shocking, with its inevitability, universality and our utter powerlessness in the face of it. It touches us deeper than perhaps anything else, and rationality, in situations like these, is no help. All we can do are the things that remind us that, for now, we are alive. Togetherness tops the list.