The Lost Pedestrian

Hi. I just called to say ‘hello.’ You know I think of you all of the time. And even if I had more time, I would most likely not stop thinking of you. There isn’t a moment that goes by these days without your shadow behind me, your halo hovering above me. But no amount of shadows or halos will be enough to fill this hole, this gaping hole where your presence once dwelled.

But no matter how much I think of you has no correlation or influence upon whether or not you are even thinking of me at all. And if you are, perhaps the equivalent of a Facebook ‘like.’ And not much more than that. I hate to think about it. Why can’t you just be here? It doesn’t seem fair.

But I should not complain. My house is not on fire. My city is not on fire. My air conditioning works. The streets are not flooding. The heat is semi-tolerable. I am gainfully employed. Why doesn’t any of that distract me from these thoughts of you.

If I keep typing, perhaps I can will you into existence. I can summon you with each vowel and consonant. I am trying. Perhaps I am trying too hard. Maybe that’s how I got into trouble in the first place.

such a fool I was

such a foolishy foolish fool

I often wonder just how many minutes I have not spent as a fool

Or The Fool

A fool such as I

Even now, as I imagine someone reading these words, I feel particularly foolish

And it’s not anything I can explain

It’s not anything I even feel like explaining

It just is

That’s how it just is

It’s not as if I can’t help it. Whatever ‘it’ is. I’ve never been particularly helpful to ‘it’

It doesn’t think it matters. But I tell it it matters. It matters a lot. To me it matters a great deal. I try to tell it to it al. of the time. But it seems like it never listens.

It has grown tiresome to me.

My therapist is curious to know why I never know what to say in therapy, except to say that I don’t know what to say. She doesn’t seem to think it is a problem. Or doesn’t seem to understand why I would say it is a problem. So maybe it isn’t such a problem. There are so many other problems, some of which exist, some of which do not.

These are the final days before I hopefully reach immunity from covid. And of course I thought I’d pay homage to it by having yet one final psychosomatic (hopefully) bout of the virus. My throat hurts. I have waves, dense thick, unwieldy, inconvenient waves of utter fatigue. Hopefully this will be the end of it. And I am so grateful to have survived. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it. The post-survival part of life.

It really has been a spiritual vacuum, especially these past few months where I am so trapped in my own head, that I often forget to gaze out the window, the physical and metaphorical window. At dusk, I saw the sun pouring down over a rooftop across the street in a warm orange’ish glow. It was a nice reminder that there is a sky and a universe. They still exist. They have not forgotten how to exist. They have no need for an existence therapist. An Existologist.

I, on the other hand, would prefer to be an existologist, rather than a librarian. Maybe it’s not too late. It feels like I am almost too late for everything.

Time was running out of us. Or as one of us said, there was no time to lose.

We were trying to beat the traffic. We could feel it coming for us. The traffic.

I said what’s the hurry? And everyone else said have you looked at the clock lately? I said “clocks don’t tell the whole story.”

The story that began the day an angry god condemned us to wander the sky for 40 days and 40 nights.

What could we have done to deserve this?

Someone said, it wasn’t a matter of what we did. It was a matter of how we did it.

If only we could have done it differently. Whatever it was.

You never write to me anymore.

I write to you all of the time. But I forget to type it out. And then I forget to send you what I forget to type.

That sounds complicated.

It is SO complicated. I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Who says you have to start anywhere?

I don’t know. But somebody said it.

Whoever it was probably didn’t know what they were talking about. I say that with all due respect.

With all due respect. Isn’t everyone due respect in some form or another.

I would hope so.

I will cling to that hope.

Like you have never clung before.

if only I could

feel something, I might know I

am not dead inside

Have you ever fallen in love with a licensed social worker who you then tried to impress and eventually win over by helping her diagnose and then treat her most difficult clients?

If so, how did that work for you?

If not, what steps could you have taken that would lead to that outcome with the next licensed social worker who captures your infatuation?

Or what would have happened if this licensed social worker happened to be your therapist? Would that put a damper on your passions? Or would that only amplify them to such a degree that you had no choice, but to confess and open yourself up for censure and possible abandonment?

I am not sure why I am thinking about these questions since they clearly have nothing to do with anything in my life. I don’t even know any licensed social workers.

Things I have forgotten ..

How to write

When to write

Who to write to

Where I fit in, in the larger scheme of things

What the larger scheme of things appears to be

How to jump into things without fear of the consequences of my decisions

What color eyes she has

Why I can’t sleep

How much sleep I am not getting

The last time I had an erotic dream

The first thing we said to each other

A/nd what we said after that

If it will stop raining

How to stop time

If I can replenish the years I have lost

What would happen if I can’t

I ‘braved’ going out in the midst of a pandemic surge to see an allergist to see why I am having all of these sneezing seizures of late. Like sneezing 6 or 7 times in a row. Not that I am complaining. There is something pleasurable about the buildup to and release of a sneeze (the non-infectious kind). It’s not quite erotic. It’s not quite unerotic.

What a perverse thing to say.

Anyway, once I arrived at the allergist’s office, I realized I had forgotten my hearing aids. I hardly ever wear them. I mean, in quarantine, there really isn’t anything to hear, except for music and TV and podcasts, all hearable with headphones. Otherwise, I can go days and weeks without hearing or speaking a live human voice.

Which makes hearing aids kind of extraneous.

But even if I was wearing them, I don’t think I would have been able to decipher the words spoken by people wearing masks and plastic shields over masks.

So this allergist was very patient with me and all of my questions. She gave me all sorts of great information, none of which I could hear. But I acted as if I could. And maybe I did, on a subconscious level.

And it’s so strange but I have not sneezed, even once, since I left that appointment. Maybe the allergist was invoking some sort of magic, behind the mask and the shield.

OMG. I can’t believe I haven’t written anything in over a month. And so much has happened in the world, so much as happened in me, I would not know where to begin.

How strange it is to be back in my home city, reunited with my community of friends who I have had absolutely no contact with, because of covid. I traded in my New England quarantine for a Chicago quarantine and it feels almost exactly the same. But with better take out options. It’s true.

Strangers are a bit friendlier too.

Even behind masks.

But not being able to smile at anyone… this is no way for people to live. Which I should not be complaining about because the main thing to do right now is to try to keep living. Try as hard as one can.

Writing makes me very tired.

Any effort makes me tired.

But I should not complain.

At least I still inhabit a body that is still capable of getting tired.

In last night’s dream, I had just been elected as Senator of Massachusetts. I have no idea how that happened. I wasn’t even on the ballot.

At first I thought there was no way I wanted the job. But then I thought it might look good on my resumé.

And then I thought it might not be a good career move because it would narrow my options once my term was completed. I would only be qualified for Senator jobs in the future which felt way too limiting. So I should probably not accept the election results.

And then I thought about all of the people who were expecting me to serve in the Senate and how embarrassing it might be for me to back out of it, and maybe it would be easier for everybody if just I accepted the results.

But then I thought maybe this would not be such a good idea because if I had to deal with issues related to the economy, I would not be very good at it because I’ve always been terrible at math.

In last night’s dream, I killed someone and hid the body in somebody’s bedroom, in between the bed and the nightstand. I can’t recall the act of murder, how I did it, or the identity of the (male) victim. Or why.

I can recall the guilt and fear of the consequences for my crime. I think I spent a large part of the dream (a very long dream) trying to figure out where I would move the body, and how I would move it by myself (which I didn’t think would be possible).

I should be more diligent in writing down dreams while they are still fresh. Because I missed a lot of details. But the feeling of fear and guilt has lingered with me all day.

There may have been a woman friend, returning from some far destination. And I may have been really concerned that she would think less of me when she learned I was a murderer.

Or possibly she may have forgiven me because it was an isolated occurrence that hopefully would not happen again. Perhaps I had learned a lesson of some sort.

It seems like the location was significant. It may have been a house with many many bedrooms. And the room where I hid my body may have belonged to my friend.

I feel like I’m on the verge of something and it might be significant. Or it might not. But it feels like something’s coming.

It might be my vision from my left eye, slowly returning.

Or an impending move.

Or the new job.

Or a new mystery person.

Or an old mystery person.

Or a person without mystery.

Or it could be a journey.

Or a bag of potato chips.

Or a jar of herring.

Or my performance in 3 weeks

Or a pond of koi fish in the middle of a courtyard.

Who knows what it could be?

Today was a retina surgery kind of day. An interocular lens replacement kind of day. It was quite an ordeal. The anesthesiologist somehow managed not to anesthetize me and I was awake for the entire procedure which was supposed to take 1 and was at least twice as long.

They had me flat on my back, staring at some sort of curtain over me. And all I could see were these gelatinous shapes that kept changing color and form. And it was a struggle to breathe through my face mask and the curtain. And then my back started spasming. I was much more alert and awake then I normally am in my non-anesthesiatic life.

The doctors and nurses were chattering constantly. Sometimes one doctor giving the others instructions. And sometimes they were playing some sort of name-that-country geographic word game. What is the country south of Senegal? What is the country just east of Ecuador? Etc.

I also learned that my retinalogist was a serious hiker and mountain climber. He talked about trying to climb Mt. Rainier and failing at it. He seemed humbled.

I may have accidentally outlived my body’s usefulness. And now I’m not quite what to do next, other than to pretend that it never happened.