Today I Woke Up Sad

This morning’s dream was a documentary, set in a village somewhere in Afganistan; leathery old men, young girls with shiny black hair, lots of talking and gesticulating. I turned over and rubbed my aching sinuses, wondering how my subconscious came up with this this time.

The throbbing beneath my cheekbones echoed the distant rumbling of thunder. I knew this was a big storm just by listening - every two or three seconds, another low, rolling wave resounded. Going over the dream, I thought about the book “Kite Runner” that I read this summer, and then jumped to the installation of thousands of pairs of shoes on the Diag that I saw yesterday. Each pair of shoes represented an Iraqi civilian or American soldier killed in Iraq. I wondered if someone on the exhibition team had the job of watching the news or listening to the radio to find out how many shoes they would need to add the next day. I wondered if they had a big crate of shoes and military boots that travelled with them - how many would they need?

I sighed and put my hand down to pet my good and patient kitty, curled up by my hip, waiting quietly for her breakfast. The weather approached rapidly and soon I could see the lightning flashes even through my closed eyelids. Kitty doesn’t like the thunder, and hopped down to creep under the bed. I tend to sleep on the right side of the bed, as if saving the left side will make a lover appear. Well, they do say if you act as though you already have everything you want in life, it will come to you. A well-rehearsed fantasy of a man with strong arms starts up in my head, but the lack of a real partner hurts too much this morning, and I can’t have who I want and should stop thinking of him, so I turn the fantasy off. Who are “they” anyway? Do they know what it’s like to have a heart that feels like a boiled tomato when you split the skin and all the guts run out? I sighed again and rolled over to the left side of the bed.

My shoulders ache from all the time spent at the keyboard during the week. Some yoga usually helps for a while, but the ache soon comes back. I pulled myself into a modified “child pose,” knees to my chest, forehead to the mattress, arms stretched above my head. “Child pose” looks like a Muslim at worship. I breathed in long, slow, deep breaths to soften my belly and breathed out tension and affirmation that I am connected to the cosmos, and as such I am enough, and have everything I need to handle whatever life brings my way. As my breath curled out of me it carried little prayers, that my house would withstand the thunderstorm, that my heart would survive the storms of its own strange passions, that the world would outlast all the shit and hate and fire we rain down on it and each other, and someday heal.

The rain pounded at the windows and the thunder shook the house. I knew I should get up, feed the cat, do the laundry, go buy the newspapers, write this out. But I didn’t. I stayed there for a while, just another small mammal sheltering in her nest, another member of a race of wee, cow’rin’, tim’rous beasties whose plans gang aft a-gley.