CRAZY WEEK, part three and a half
Wednesday night/Thursday morning: It had been a rough 3 days. Three little days that could have been an entire month because each day seemed to go on forever. Truth be told, Thursday and Friday were almost nothing, not even footnotes in the annals of CRAZY WEEK. But by Wednesday night, I was strung out, stretched out, worn out, and drama-ed out. Getting lost on the way home that night really did no good. Especially since I got lost because I missed my exit because I was trapped in the middle lane on all sides by semi-trucks and never even saw the exit.
Anyhow, that was part of Wednesday and by the time I got home it was very clearly Thursday. I figured I would sleep like the dead but was granted no such victory.
Semi-trucks haunted my dreams. The smell of an old sleeper-cabin used for intimate activities jerked at my senses even through sleep. A slight overtone of Old Spice - the original - hanging over the primitive rankness. The feeling of being unstable where every so often, at unpredictable times, the whole world would sway and shudder like slipping at the edge of a cliff and knowing how close I came to falling into the sea. The damp heat of stagnant, sun-warmed air, sweat wanting to rise on my bare skin kept at bay only by an unwillingness to do anything that might prove I am alive. A distant roar, steady as the droning of bees, with sudden crescendos as of angry waves breaking against unbeatable cliffs.
The first night, only my senses were assailed but they were assaulted repeatedly throughout the short night. In the morning, knowledge - new to me but as old as the memories themselves - existed where a blank void had been. I prefer the blank void. After that night and every night since, more has been added to the dream... words, pictures, feelings, footage that continues beyond the sensory snapshot of Wednesday night. No new knowledge has emerged from the dreams, just the intense and painful re-enactment of one horrible night long ago that happened to a different person, to a little girl who now refuses to speak for herself, even among the anonymity of the group structure. She cries now, the little girl, for she feels the pain that I no longer remember except as fact. I think it is like the knowledge that brothers fought against each other in the Civil War and the horrid, rending pain that must have created in their hearts - I know it was painful, but I do not *feel* the pain of it.
She existed before that night. She existed long before that night. And she exists still today. She shelters me from the pain that hurts the heart too much to bear, turns it into someone else's pain, leaving behind simply the knowledge that it was painful. I do not know when she appeared in my head. Perhaps she was the first of the Voices that were more than a thought, perhaps she is nothing more than that even now.
I cannot go further tonight. My heart keeps seizing like an icy hand gripping it painfully tight and releasing just as quick. It isn't a panic attack per se. It's more like a spasm, but it grips my heart and radiates pain and shock and fear and horror and hopelessness and death all together in one, maybe two seconds. Then it passes, leaving me wondering if I truly felt all that so quickly and praying it doesn't happen again.
"Pray with me, Forrest!
"Please, God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away from here...
"Please, God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away from here...
"Please, God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away from here..."
(Jenny in Forrest Gump)
The worst jokes I have ever written
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