I am coming home from work, from the university library, doing more research, trying to connect to a community, but today has been a bad day even moreso than other days. I have not been productive. Nothing happened. And don’t you hate it, when you get home from such days, bad as they already are, to drag your finger across the screen in search of the regular plethora of inane information online only to stumble upon an old photo – a young photo – of a peer you used to know or work with and only to find that the photo links to her untimely obituary. Your life grinds to a halt for many reasons like, you miss her, you’re afraid of death too and what’s it like to be dead? And so on, some thoughts being shallow and insecure not yet fit for publication. So a young, beautiful Anglo-girl with pale skin and sparkling blue eyes with an intelligence many bigoted would think to be unseemly for a woman?
I got home early from Carleton because my day was really boring. I was so tired and fed up with this test of endurance, this so-called freelance life which sometimes just serves up a ton of anxiety and depression that oft comes with irregular income and a finicky mind made for writing. Clients verbally abuse me when they don’t want to pay – some really low blows too – and other stupid people tell me it’s my lot in life as a freelancer. But I opt to give it back to them. Both groups. You can’t complain to the boss, right?
Nothing ever changes. The same ol’shit and problems and hassles and people who can’t live emotionally balanced lives. And I’m just sitting here, in this library, wishing for a plain, nothingness on some days, or maybe every day if you catch me at the right time. Or maybe, to look up at the stars for an eternity or turn into one of them, so brilliant yet so far away, inspiring, but not burning you to a crisp. I promise. They look like souls up there, in the night. The incarnation of heaven with God’s wonders waiting to be found. But I’m here in this physical, earthly body. I’d rather be pure energy.
So I lay on my bed, after all that, and skim through the internet on my Samsung tablet without a care in the world until I get this bright idea to look people up from the past. Or to be honest, to compare myself to them as I oft do when I’m feeling lucky. It’s a dumb proces though, often ending with more than a pang of regret over my bad luck, bad choices and bad people I wish I could have avoided soon enough. What I could have done with just a bit of forethought!
But I don’t really care right now. My scrolling activity is just frivolous shit after an unproductive day as a writer-wannabe. I’m really just in a bad mood, to be honest, and you ought to stay away from me on these days because that’s what I do. So as I’m scrolling I come across a photo that just barely looks like a co-worker. Someone I liked, but didn’t befriend. I was manic shit in those days, so I did her a favour. I was self-imploding after years of unwanted solitude only to emerge with triple anxiety and hang-ups most people coped at a healthier, but still painful pace. For me, it was just constant, inner torture that I tried to hide with a melancholic face I inherited as a teenager. The professionals labeled me existential. I didn’t.
So I keep looking at this photo; a black and white photo of a young girl, a teenager, just barely looking like my co-worker’s eyes and that mischievous grin she had in the office that meant she knew something you didn’t and well, you oughta just go back to work. She meant that in the nicest way and was right about everything. She was a quiet, charming woman whose character as built on hard-work and responsibility. She didn’t rock the boat. No, she kept it steady without too much fuss. But, I’m thinking as I’m eyeing this photo suspiciously, that she’s not one to put that kind of photo online.
I click on the image, rummage through a page which I’m slowly realizing to be someone’s obituary. I see other photos, now adult ones, now looking just like the person I worked with and now feeling the blood rush from my face. I scroll down to read the comments and notice past co-workers comments of condolences. A cold feeling glides up my spine. Not again, I think to myself. But then, Yes, of course again, I think right after without trying to feel too betrayed by God. I keep scrolling, reading the comments and remembering the cost of letting my negative feelings take over again.
* * *
I’ve fallen asleep on my bed. I don’t remember taking my clothes or getting into my pyjamas. I don’t sleep well. I haven’t since my late twenties. I’ve learned to go into a deep sleep with what time I have instead. I’d rather be awake all the time and rejuvenate by just sitting around doing nothing. It’s preferable to going comatosed at night. I always found it weird how we all accept going to bed at night. It’s just odd. Why wouldn’t it be normal to just stay awake all the time?
But I have fallen asleep with my clothes on, on my bed with the lights turned off. I am in my old neighbourhood again. The one I grew up in as a kid. The one where I had my best friend, Chad. The one where I had my old paper route. I go back there a lot when I dream. I done this ever since we moved. Clegg Street was my favourite route, but I’m not on that right now. I loved being a paper boy. It was a great way to make money. And my route was filled war vets and grieving parents who never got their kids back and Olympic medalists next to federal politicians living in big, Ottawa houses. Not to mention civil engineer Dr. Robert Leggett who frequently told me stories and assured me one day that I would travel the world. I miss his English accent and aged wife. They were so old-fashioned and wonderful in that way. Oh, and I also saw Prime Minister Jean Chretien coming home from work most evening. But he looked like he was in a permanent scowl, not to mention he never returned my greetings. (But I’m sure he had a lot on his mind back then.)
Anyway, in the dream, the street looks shabby and I am running from person to person – people that I don’t even know or ever met before – and I am ripping something off their shoulder like a paper covering a tattoo or a layer of skin or something like that. I’m not grossed out in the dream, I am just going through a process. Beneath the paper is fine artwork like a flower or crystalline structure of some kind. I keep going from person to person with no sound, no nothing, like I am swimming in an ocean or walking through a thick atmosphere, repeating the same motion. Then it goes dark, fade to black and I am awake in my bed with my clothes on and the lights off.
I hate waking up early in the morning because I won’t fall asleep again. I’ll be tired all day and that will make me unusually hyper. It also means I will fall asleep when I’m reading which will interfere with my need to read at least a few hours a day. But I’m feeling something other than fatigue in my body. An emotion. An echo from the dream I just had. I search for it. I like it and I’m scared of it. Love? The kind of love your mother gives you. The kind of love you feel with a teacher who likes you. The kind you get in a family or friends. The kind that holds up life, makes it worthwhile, makes it sweeter and worth living?
I’ve lost this over the years. Dealing with too much abuse, harassment, bullying and depressions. Then it led to an aspirational tone that gave me a thrill ride that killed my soul another way. I haven’t been working all these years, I’ve been chasing or running away. This love I felt when I was a kid and that was so easy back then. And here it is, in my body, after this dream, out of nowhere. Did the dream unleash my chakras? Is that what I was peeling away? Each tattoo a chakra point? I have been thinking and thinking and thinking over these past ten years. But it was the only way. I had to think it through. I had to get to the bottom of bad thinking. I have been vulnerable to the wrong people. Now, I had to be vigilante.
This love. I’m going to forget this when I get up. Aren’t I? I think to myself. I will forget it like a dream.I can feel it. I’m already forgetting. I need this clue. I need this reference point to know what to work on when I get up. Love, I think to myself. Remember this feeling. Love.
I wake up the following morning and sure enough, the feeling is gone. But I remember wanting to remember the feeling, so I can summon it again, at least partially. But it also made me think about what just happened.
Did Melanie’s death affect me that much? Did it jostle something within me? Or did she help? I’d rather say that my feelings for her summoned an old feeling inside of me. Or maybe I kinda got a feeling she had when I was around her. Like she was surrounded by people that loved her and she fit into that and exuded it to me on some subliminal level. Or maybe Heidegger was right. Take a walk through a cemetery and you’ll find out what’s important when you wake up.
All I know is that given what I’ve just been through, and some of the horrible people I’ve met, that building a writing career isn’t enough. I need to build love too.