If I felt depressed I would say that I needed to increase the dose of medication I am on. If my outlook was burnt umber-dark—if I felt I am without any kind of future, I would say that I was indeed depressed. I am disinterested, certainly. Honestly I can say that I am without any interest whatsoever, in anything. I did just spend almost an hour peeling flat warts and non-pigmented skin from my hands and forearms and that interested me for a while, but only in a marginally obsessive way; and I did have the energy to get up, get the flashlight out of the drawer and go outside in the sharply cold wind of a springtime Wyoming night and pull up the sunblind from the studio window.
A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
If the blinds hadn't been whapping the house in just that annoying way I wouldn't have done it at all though. My mind wanders around in its nightscape and always rests on two things—the disturbing dream of two early mornings ago and the man to whom I used to refer as my best friend, but only because until our friendship ended I insisted on using that quaint holdover from junior high. Why these images should come so often to mind is one of the mysteries of my mental illness for me. Why is it, for example, that a day at the Albuquerque Zoo should come into my mind's eye when I would brush my now-deceased dog who wasn't even alive at the time; or a particular intensity of sunlight remind me of standing on a terrace in the garden of Isola Bella? Disassociative memories are what I call them—memories that are brought out of storage by things other than the usual triggers of smell or similarity. Maybe I should just call them ghosts. That's what this dream was full of, this dream that is still stuck in my mind like a leaf pushed up against a rock in midstream where the current can't dislodge it: a friend and her husband and I, and also the unseen but felt presence of my estranged brother in a grey suit, are exploring a clapboard house in a mostly abandoned, former oil drilling community on the north side of the river. How we got there was not as important as the idea that getting there should have been difficult because of the flooding that had washed away the bridge to the town. This was apparent because I could see, as if from a bird's-eye view, back down the long sloping road to the ford where the bridge had been from the top of the wind-stripped hill on which the faded green house stood. As we explored the empty rooms, the layers of linoleum crackling beneath our feet, the vividness of the once cheerful green-patterned wallpapers intrigued us. The rooms were large as if to house and feed a crowd of family or workers—perhaps this had been a boarding house for the oil field nearby. We strolled along the sunlit early June main street, its dirt now drifted against the wicket-wire fences of small houses, and found the front wall of the Masonic Temple collapsed into the grassy space formerly occupied by the structure. The wall, fallen in its entirety, was made of concrete incised to appear as if it had an Ionic facade of columns and a tympanum. Even the doors were scratched into the surface as if with a stick when the cement was still wet, with lichen spotting it overall. I watched all of us get into a red van-like vehicle that faced south towards the distant mountain—as usual I am both in the dream and watching myself in the dream. During the entire sequence I am very aware of looking for my dog and for my old best friend. The blown dirt, the bright sunlight, the cold June wind, the tufts of fresh green grass are all very vivid. From that scene I moved into another of helping my father and maybe my mother pack to leave me and I am again looking for my dog and my former best friend. This is not uncommon in my dreams, this jump from one dream to another where I am in an apartment or motel room or even someone's house, helping my parents pack to "go back home". I don't live in any of these places. I am there to help only and must make my own way home as best I can after everyone else is gone.
These dreams lead me back to my own disinterest of being me. They seem like they might be unusual, even compelling to someone—a scholar perhaps. I rage to be special to someone, not just to myself. My specialness is freakish though, and after shame about this I feel destitution and then numbness. There is shame in being me, so deep, so black it's like tar. I'm not special after all, for I have no one to whom I can tell these dreams. All the people in them are gone and even as I look for them in the rooms of old houses, in apartments and motel rooms and the homes of people I am visiting but don't know, I am aware of their disappearance from my life. Like negative space defined by the objects surrounding it, my silhouette against the sky becomes simply sky with nothing to hold it. I am dry rot, blown dirt, the legless remnant of an insect in a dirty windowsill. Tell me: if there is no one left who loved me, do I cease to exist?