Big feelings. How annoying.

The day is really beautiful, big swooping winds and nodding flowers, whistling gusts creeping in through the screen. The sky is blue. The clouds are puffy. I am a good person. I am not homeless yet, but I am feeling restless and unrooted. It feels weird that the day is so nice but my anxiety is so strong. What if? How? When? How much?

Outside someone is cooking hamburgers and the smell is coming through my window. I feel bad for wanting to eat their burger. I feel bad for feeling bad when the day is nice and I should be in it making amazing things happen because I am alive and the world is full of possibilities.

I meant to call a woman I know who has late stage breast cancer. I mean to call her every day. I think about her all the time. I don't know how to talk to her right now because I just lost another friend to breast cancer. It makes me mad that cancer can even exist inside of people who are friends and mamas and sisters and daughters. Boobs are for feeding babies and looking lovely in sundresses, not turning into mean killers. I miss my friend. The one who is gone and the one who is not. I feel terrible that I am such a horrible person and didn't try harder to connect and that I am still not doing it even though I should be. I just don't know how to not be a downer. My problems are big and stupid, but imminent death is bigger and stupider. I don't even know what to say to death. Maybe fuck off until we're all 120 years old? That seems reasonable right? Everything is so fragile. How gorgeous and terrifying.

Update: Buh. I re-read this and find that it came out all wrong. Basically it feels like everyone else knows what to do and their ducks are all in a row and their priorities are all straight and their emotions are the just right kind and that's the kind of mojo I'd like to get in on. Not this other thing. This terrified apathy where things are still beautiful but mostly only for other people. I've got big things in front of me. I feel like I'm about to high dive into a pool but I know there is no water in it. I am supposed to jump and know that somehow its going fill up in that brief time between jumping and landing. I'm running out of faith. And telling myself to just cut it out is overly simplistic and ineffective. So now what?

Update Some More: I am also yelling at myself in the voice of my sister. She judged me pretty harshly and since then we haven't spoken. So now I have picked up the flavor of that conversation and I am hitting myself over the head with it. How dumb. How merciless. How unfair to everyone. I miss my sister. She took a lot of things really wrong and now it's all full of bees and I am still pissed off but not how she might imagine. And she is probably still pissed off but not how I would imagine, and in between all this imagining is the fact that we are not communicating and in the meantime, life just keeps running out and rolling on and filling and emptying and all those other things it does.

"These are things that I'm gonna do."

I will survive financially. I will have fresh food to eat and I will keep my apartment. I will pay everyone back. I will stop having anxiety attacks every time I think about money. I will reach an equitable agreement with my ex-husband. I will enjoy my life. I will keep my integrity and enjoy meaningful work.

Four weird dreams

Four days ago I woke from a dream I was getting ready to tell a story on stage at Wild Goose but realized (suddenly) that I was about to give birth. I gave birth onstage, privately, quickly and behind a partion. The crowd gasped when I presented her. She had pigtails and could already stand up and she told me I could tell my story now.

Three days ago I woke from a dream my ex-boyfriend had an adorable tiny blonde girlfriend with whom he had an adorable tiny blonde girlchild. He looked happy and responsible. It was nice. 

Two days ago I woke from a dream I was standing in a crowded field with Mike, Miles and Katie. I noticed a strange ripple in the sky and suddenly the air was full of low helicopters. They were shouting to us over a loud speaker to get down and that we needed to be checked for radiation. In the middle of the crowd there was a man who was still standing. He had some kind of hand held device that he used to scan the people around him. It made weird beeping noises for everyone, including Mike and Katie, but when he got to me and Miles it made no sound. We were pulled out of the crowd and taken to a room where we were re-scanned. Everyone nodded, we were herded out of the room and told to walk to a helicopter. We walked past Mike and Katie, they were both shouting for us and wondering what was happening. We were not allowed to say goodbye, we were just whisked off without explanation. I woke up sweating. It scared the shit out of me. 

This morning I woke from a dream that I was about 10, walking home from school with my cousin Kathy. We passed this old building that had a weird Dr. Suess looking facade and I wanted a picture of it really bad. The sun was just starting to go down and the way the light was hitting it  was just breathtaking. I couldn't get my camera function to open on my phone and I was frantic that I was going to lose my golden moment. As I was fumbling I looked up to see that my cousin had walked on and was now just a tiny dot on the horizon. Suddenly the sky went fantastic, giant white billowy clouds over the Detroit skyline, with the light just shooting through in a breathtaking way. I was fumbling with my camera again, frustrated that no matter how many pictures I tried to take, none of them ever captured what it looked like in real life. Night started to settle in and I knew I had a long walk ahead of me if I was going to make it to Hamtramck on foot. I was on a regular, well marked path that suddenly turned claustrophobic and hard to follow. It was like one of those built up walkways leading out over a swamp, hemmed in By sharp razor grass. I was getting scared and about to turn around. It was dark, there were loud bugs and frogs all around. I saw a creepy man coming and crawled under the walkway and curled up on a beam to wait it out. He paused above me and announced that it was time to irradiate and then he chuckled and I could feel a weird buzzing through my whole body. He was trying to flush me out and I was trying to take it, silently. The body buzz got stronger, almost paralyzing. I could still feel it when I woke up. It felt like the electro-stim I used to get from my chiropractor. It was weird, but I remember thinking, "Ha ha bastard, joke's on you, I can crank that shit up to 10 and not fall off the beam."