Month: January 2019

Anniversaries, Breakups, and Dreams

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Today is Morgan’s birthday. She would have been 44. I’m sure she would still be ravishing.

But that’s not what I have to say today. I’ve been off, living my life, like she would have insisted. And, in the course of doing so, I’ve dated. My last breakup was about 3 months ago. It was an outlier relationship in that it effected me physically as well as emotionally. Specifically, it eased my anxiety and allowed me to sleep at least 8 hours straight through each night. That itself changed me. My depression faded, as it’s exacerbated by sleep deprivation. My health got better and I was not sick for a single day. Which is not to say I’m generally ill but I often feel out of sorts at least once a month.
So it showed me that many of my problems were sleep linked.

I’ve never been a sleeper. Most nights getting between 4-6 hours and crashing once or twice a week. Much of that was occupationally created. Waking up to any odd sound was a bonus in what I had been doing. And not needing as much sleep was just as useful. But my mind and body have paid the toll for that.

So, here I am, 3 months on. Traditionally when I start being better after a breakup. There is always those lingering pieces of why’s and what’s. And after 3 months you start to know, emotionally, that you will never know. So you take from it what you can. And what I can is that sleep is important to me. Which I knew mentally, but having never experienced the effects of sustained nightly ‘enough sleep’ over more than a week; I had no frame of reference. 

The last 2 nights I’ve managed enough sleep. Enough that the dreams are back. Enough that I’m traveling the skein of lives. And seeing what some me’s are living in. Last night’s me was burying mobsters in his back yard. Because he was somehow smart enough to be in charge of a criminal syndicate and dumb enough to bury bodies in his back yard. He was also married to a nice and oblivious woman who adopted kittens and kept bees. Most of the dream was his buying digging supplies and lye from a orange craftsmen store. And playing with kittens.

Dreams are weird.

Nightmares are also dreams Part 19-Interlude

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The warehouse stinks of copper and shit and wet metal. The last few surviving members of the kidnapping team are living out their final moments. Their ragged gasps are the only sound. Their throats have long since given out, though their screams seem to have soaked into the walls. This silence, these last few minutes, are all the peace left to them.

Jen plays the spray over the concrete. The blood and offal swirl into the open drain. The chiaroscuro of reds and blacks under the lights, where dark deeds are done. Cleanup is always important.

The soft shhh of the spray lulls the mind and Jen slips into a meditative state. Her body aches with the days exertions and she mulls over the names and places they got from the men. Each one representing another link in the long chain leading to the group that’s so raised Pel’s ire. The images, Jen thinks, are too close to his own desires. Caged in a iron will, he can’t let others do what his impulses lead him to. 

The sound of frantic beeping raises her from her reverie. The EEG cutting off, leaving silence and the small sounds of movement and breathe, as one of her team turns off the warning and drags the body over to the disposal area.

Jen sighs as her lieutenant brings over the sign-off for this op. She signs her name and turns it over to her subordinate.

“Standard arrangement. Crematorium then an interior burn of the site. Then get everyone home. Tomorrow we start tracking this down,” Jen orders, waving vaguely. 

Janus nods and heads off to supervise the loading of the bodies.

The sound of Bolero rings out and Jen reaches into her jeans, fishing out the cell. The call ID says Misty.

“Hey, hon,” Jen answers. She walks to the side door to the secured parking lot and steps into the early afternoon light. The heat of the sun and the warmth of the air bring her out of operational mode. Affection suffuses her voice, “No, I’ll be home on time tonight. Do you want me to pick up anything on my way home?… No, that sounds delicious. I’ll see you soon.”

Work life balance is so important. 

Tears flow down, allowed to be

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It’s fucked up. To be lost in love, to be missing someone who is no longer there. To make stupid decisions because you see some remembrance, some twinkle of reminder in someone else. I want to say it’s seeing something wonderful in someone else. Something I recognize because I’ve known it. I want it to be a good reason. But I can’t help but see the other side and think that I’m being dishonest. That I’m looking for her in others and deceiving them and myself. That I’m seeing what I need to see.

Maybe I’m just not in the mood to be charitable, to harness the better demons of my nature. Maybe that negative view is bullshit. I hope it is. I hope I’m recognizing that glimmer of beauty because I’ve known it. Because I knew Morgan. I hope Morgan knows I’m trying and not just wallowing in darkness.

But I can’t know. The 30th is Morgan’s Birthday. She would have been 44. I loved her. I love her still. I’ll love her always.

As I love and will love all those I’ve loved. Because she showed me.

Slipping slowly….unable to wake…or find my way home

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When I don’t have a romantic focus, I feel an emptiness. Like I’m going through the motions, like I’m not doing what I am. A cipher. And when days that are deep in remembrance approach and I am without focus, I fill. I fill with a vast sadness. An ocean of memories and lost hopes pours in. Until I become nothing but sadness. Until I lose my self, bit by bit, on a empty sea under a moonless sky. Until sleep and dreams lose their ability to be a refuge and I live in happy moments, deep in dream, which shatter as dust on waking. I seek almost any distraction. Trying to ward off a few minutes of thinking. Until, striped, without shield or succor, I am bare and sleep…traitorous…rapturous sleep…resets the stage and again and again, I lose her.

Better a dirge than bitter silence

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devolution of appetite yearning for the next pointless acquisition bleeds into limbs
Lifting and depositing eager avarice into wet red clacking maw
Small voices screaming for surcease
Unheeded and ignored
Self destruction made simpler than devotion
Placed pointless to gain ground
Stolen places and time
Daily resolutions
False hopes as it all slips away
Holding too tightly
All dreams
Die