Laurustina

This morning, I woke around 7:30. My dreams weren’t particularly memorable but an oppressive depression lingered. It was only 73 degrees in the house, but the bedroom felt hot and still. I stumbled out onto the back porch, where it was already in the mid-eighties in the shade.

Yesterday was one of those “good” days and I’m starting to notice that the really bad days tend to follow the “good” ones.I don’t know quite how to explain the really bad days except to say that they start with a paralyzing sadness and sense of hopelessness…the first wave registering the loss, followed in quick succession by a measured assessment of aches and pains (my body being in full, furious breakdown…muscles screaming from lack of use, joints groaning at the thought of the simplest tasks), the panic of ever-spiraling external pressures…need a doctor, and a job, and new tires and what the hell am i going to do about every-other-fucking-thing that comes into my head in the three minutes between the moment i wake up and the moment i give up and decide to throw out the orchid that my brother Kenny and his wife gave us back in February, which has been sitting out on the back porch for two days because i meant to try to figure out how to keep it from dying despite the fact that it was already mostly dead.

I don’t actually get rid of the plant until later tonight, just before midnight, when Mr. J. carried it out to the bin for me and tossed it in. But at 7:35 this morning, I knew it was doomed and I stopped caring that I’d failed to keep it alive. I stubbed out my first cigarette of the day, went back inside and laid down on the couch beneath the ceiling fan where at least the constant air movement made it cool enough to sleep for another hour or two.

Twice, in the last month, I have been visited by you in my dreams. In the first, three weeks ago, you were maybe four or five, with that blond bowl haircut and giant grin. From across the room, a crowd between us, you flashed me that grin and mouthed the words “I love you” to which I replied, also soundlessly, “love you, love you, love you too”.

In the second dream, just two nights ago, you were even younger, toddling alongside me with a group of others on a bluff overlooking some sea. Immediately, I swept you up and cuddled you, nuzzled the back of your neck and breathed in your still-just-a-baby smell.

Both times, the dreams were lucid, in that I was fully aware of your absence in the waking world, yet the pain and grief could not break through the joy of your presence. Upon waking, each time, these little gifts…this tiny measure of bliss has stayed with me for the remainder of the day. Is it any wonder then, that I want to sleep so much and travel in times and places where I might just run into you?

If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early spring, is livin’ there, I hear
Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow
She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so.

When I first sat down to write this, I typed the following: Tomorrow would have been her seventeenth birthday.

I was still sitting here staring at that sentence fifteen minutes later when Micachu came into the room and put his new Pain of Salvation DVD into the PS3 to play their cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluah” for me.The song is, of course, beautiful. The guitar solo alone, so delicate it could make you weep, even if you weren’t prone to weeping, which I am these days. Afterwards, I erase that first sentence and start again.

Tomorrow is her birthday. I do not know what I am supposed to do about that. The date has been creeping up on me for months and I have dreaded more than any other.  I have written and erased and rewritten the rest of this post six different times. Nothing seems right. I am beginning to suspect that I shouldn’t have tried to write it at all.You see, it’s midnight now and so…

today is their birthday and it is all that I feared it would be.

She would have been seventeen today. Instead, she will remain forever sixteen, equally brazen and fragile, an impossible tangle of surly and sweet. These last few nights I have woken more than usual, expecting to see her standing beside the bed, trying to wake me by being the quietest thing in the room. It had become a habit in those last months, when she couldn’t sleep. And somehow, it isn’t spooky or sad, as much as it is soothing, waking like that, with blurry vision and the sensation of being watched and needed. Now though, there’s nothing I can do for her except remember every little detail of her, honor every lovely thing in her brief, complicated life and hold on to her memory as tightly as I can.