Journal & Musing

I had a surge of well-being overtake me on Friday. That was God. He does that, you know.

My oldest daughter’s family moved into a new home this weekend, and my husband and I went to Dallas to help out. Going from a small house to a large one makes for easy unpacking, but nothing is easy when you have a baby. My family moved 13 times while we raised our kids. I made that number up, but it’s not a far from the truth. Seems we were always living out of boxes. Not until we moved into the house we are in now did I even unpack all the boxes that I sealed in 2005. The time capsules travelled with us. A clock inside them had stopped like a timeline with a dead end. The last 20 years have been an offshoot of the life we left behind in Austin, and we’ve left crumbs all over San Antonio and Houston and even Dallas a little since the departure. Austin isn’t where we started, but it’s where our kids did, sort of. So Austin kinda feels like home. But not really. Dallas is where I’m from and is the place I always carry with me. Now my daughter is there, so a part of me has returned home. She’s a Dallas-ite by default, and it suits her. My brother deserted Dallas for Fort Worth eons ago, and that place suits him. A bit of Austin, that place is. Stuck between two worlds, that place is, like my brother. My kids aren’t really from anywhere because they are from everywhere, but DNA has a sneaky way of pointing us to our roots.

I’ll never live in Dallas. You can never go home again, a guy said once. The house I grew up in belongs to strangers now.

We’ve been in this house for nearly seven years. I unpacked all my boxes not that long ago, finally, to find a treasure of little girl things and forgotten memories. But I still haven’t put up pictures. I haven’t reached a sense of permanence just yet.

It feels good to be back in my own bed tonight with my own pillows and my cat at the foot of my bed stalking my feet. The cat that travelled with us since Austin is a few feet underground outside my window, so I guess this home is more permanent than I’ve really thought it to be. A part of us will remain in the soil when we leave. And we will leave. It’s weird to think we won’t. A yurt wouldn’t be out of the question for us. But this isn’t Mongolia.

I wake up several times a night and generally go back to sleep within minutes. There is a bit of anxiety that I won’t, but I’ve been lucky. Not tonight, I’m afraid. I saw 2:58 when I tapped my watch. It’s now 3:39. Alarm goes off at 5. Morning comes early.

I haven’t been functioning well the last few weeks, and it’s been getting harder to keep my head above water. A lot is happening, which I feel like I could push through. But I fight my way through each day.

A sticky note appeared on my side mirror on my car one afternoon. The handwriting was that of a little girl telling me that if God is for me then who can be against me. Romans. The note is on my dash now. I saw a video about telling my brain that I am doing great because the brain believes what it’s told, even lies, and the body physically responds accordingly.

I’m sleepy. I will sleep the next hour and a half (resetting my alarm), and I will feel like I had a full night’s sleep. I feel fine.

The great thing about having a blog is being able to say whatever, however, and if someone reads it, great, and if not, great, but the words are in the world, not just your head, and on the page where you put them so you can look at them from a distance. Externalize them to gain some perspective. Maybe get a little perspective from a passerby. Passersby.

It feels good to write on the screen again. I have a few word documents of unfinished stories and such, but I don’t visit them much. I have notes in my phone that I jot down when the inspiration hits. Last weekend I sat in the sunny chair while my daughter studied at the desk next to me, and I read through old journals that have collected in a basket there. Most of the entries aren’t dated, and the journals are mostly blank. They all start with a bang and then fade to doodles and to-do lists. Then a new shiny one shows up. Then another. My daughter made fun of my many mostly-empty journals, and I reminded her that someday she and her sister will fight over them. I then found a page among many empty ones that had something silly written in handwriting that is not mine. She smiled. I flipped through a “600 Things to Draw” book and saw a giraffe on the giraffe page that I didn’t draw. She smiled again. The journals are like fly traps. Leave one out and words and doodles will get stuck to a page by unsuspecting passersby (there’s that word again) who find themselves overcome by a sudden urge to write. Silly little girls are particularly susceptible. Had I realized this sooner, I would have spread cute sparkly traps out all over.

I found my one-thing journal while going through the basket. I don’t remember where I got the idea. Maybe I read about it, or maybe I came up with it (I doubt it). The idea is to write one thing down that you learned that day. Anything. After a lot of days you can see you learned a lot of things. Keep one for a year or more and you’ll see the crazy amount of things that you learned and forgot. I relearned last weekend while flipping through my one-thing journal that worms don’t crawl into apples, they crawl out. Eggs are laid in the blossoms, and the apples grow around the eggs. Then the eggs hatch and the worms eat their way out. Nice.

Today I learned that Jon Favreau is a hotshot director who acts in his own movies. I thought he was an actor who always got stuck playing the best friend. Who knew.

Guess what? Tomorrow is Saturday, and I get to sleep in.

And now it’s bedtime the night after. I could go to bed, but I’m in that weird, loopy state when the words show up.

I’ve been learning things and getting better at fooling people into thinking I know more stuff than I do. Maybe if my brain wasn’t so clouded by exhaustion I could put some truth behind the pretending. I think people would rather the people around them to know things. There is comfort in someone else having the burden of knowledge. There is envy in it, too. I’m not looking for either, I just don’t like to not know things. And I kinda like the facade. Until the pressure to prove myself arises, anyway. In any case, I’m trusted to do as I please. That alone makes the lie worth the fear of exposure.

I do a better job when left to my own devices. Maybe the powers that be have figured that out.

Boy, I’m tired.

The conundrum now is do I eat or do I go to bed? Bed, I think. I’m too tired to chew. But I’m also too tired to get up. If my fingers weren’t comfortably tapping these keys I’d be locked in a state of torpor. I’m sleep-writing. I’m Homer Simpson driving his bed-car off the road into a purpley night-night sky.

Eyes now closing. Delta waves are flooding my brain. I like those.

I wandered around the empty house today, bored, restless, anxious, and looking for something to entertain me. I sat in the sunny chair and glanced over the bookshelf. Touched the books. Picked one up, flipped through it, put it back. Gazed at the craft supplies. Walked back downstairs and wandered through the kitchen. Nothing there. A cat stared at me. I ignored her. An interesting change, I thought. I picked up my laptop and flopped onto the couch. Opened up Eleanor and wrote in a new character, Arnold Crumbly. He’s missing and probably dead. She doesn’t know what happened to him. Neither do I.

As I lay on the couch staring at the ceiling, still in my pajamas, I thought how pitiful I am to want to do all these things but have no desire to make the effort. So I got dressed and drove to Jersey Mike’s. I listened to classic rock on the way there and wondered whether rock music is still being produced. I know what the kids are listening to these days because I’m around them most of the time, and it’s not rock. I have a “class time” playlist to expose them to the good stuff, but they already know a lot of it. It’s fun to watch them sing along while they work. Sometimes they feel the beat and show it.

Right now I’m sitting in a parking lot typing this because I like writing in warm parking lots. Robert Plant is singing, and the sun just dipped behind the treetops. Flecks on sunlight dot the concrete end the cars and the dash. A security guard dressed in black and red is sitting on a horse in the shade like a Mountie, and I wonder what he is thinking about as he watches cars. Watches people. Making up stories about their lives, maybe. I feel ya, man. I feel ya.

Why is it that I can’t sleep when school starts back up? Anxiety, maybe. Constantly thinking about what I can do better this time around and all the things I need to do immediately to avoid getting behind, maybe. Yes, and yes, and yes. My mind spirals down a rabbit hole of past failures as I tire of these contemplations.

Knowing my alarm goes off in two hours and that lack of sleep makes my brain less usable isn’t helpful..

Neither is this lit screen I’m looking at as I type and erase and retype with clumsy thumbs.

…

The book I recently finished left me unnerved. I started the book over a year ago. No, two years ago. I put it down for a year after reading halfway through because as the story progressed I became less interested. But not finishing ate at me over time. I read another quarter of the book last year and then put it down again. I recently picked it up again because I got bored with Game of Thrones (how?), and as I approached the end of the book, I became more determined to finish. I couldn’t give up so close to the end. The snowball gained speed as the end drew near, and faster and faster I became more engrossed in how this perpetual, agonizingly plot might redeem itself and whether anything good would come of the protagonist’s suffering. The book ended with the same uncertainty it maintained from the start. Did he trap her into a bondage that would play out the rest of her days out of spite? Did she welcome her destiny?

The captain looked at Férmina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost.

Was it that her grey eyelashes showed the sign of her last days? Was winter coming? Not likely in the Caribbean. Was the shudder she gave when she heard the familiar, desperate love in Florentinoo Ariza’s voice an indication that her heart had suddenly become cold? Was she happy to finally live the life she rejected 54 years ago? Was Florentino’s decision to live the remainder of their days together revenge for her denying him a lifetime of love?

…

One hour and ten minutes is what I have left for sleep. I will try again to close my eyes, but now I have that confounded book in my head.

A desperate and inescapable loneliness has overcome me this morning. Last night I woke up so many times that it’s though I haven’t slept. With everyone gone for fishing tournaments or three-day drunken frolics on the seashore or living new lives with new babies, here I am at home listening to a dishwasher that a young person with the energy of five loaded at 8 AM before getting in a car with her dog to head to Galveston with a whoosh of a goodbye. For once, reading seems like a thief, as I immerse myself in fiction while the real world lives and breathes around me, without me, and now I without it save two cats, the sound of a dripping faucet, and the life of a dishwasher that is remnant of the actions of a person I wish was still here. Not even the veil of sleep can relieve my ache, even if I could bring my mind to give in to it.

One often meets his destiny on the path he takes to avoid it.

Master Oogway, Kung Fu Panda