Disorientation

I woke disoriented today. From a dream like a horror movie, in a bed not my own. In the dream people around me were being inhabited by ghosts. Some of them carried on as normal, slightly dazed, quiescent. Others turned malicious. I was sorting through a ring bind folder where all the pages were out of order. I was sorting them back into their place, looking for what did not belong; clues to explain why some spirits turned nasty. Some of them attacked me even as I worked to unravel the mystery. For a person who avoids that kind of entertainment, even in fiction, my dreams are often surprisingly violent.

Over breakfast with my friend of over two decades, I find myself talking about my ambivalence about the ever present question of children, the ever more ethereal idea of finding a life partner. She shares for the nth time how she thought we would have the opposite lives: I'd be married with kids, while she never expected to "settle down". I tell both of us that I'm too late to take that turn, that I've been alone too long, that I couldn't cope with it anyway.  The logic is sound enough, but it's tinged with a faint disappointment, a sensation that sits uncomfortably in my gut. Decisions that cut off possible futures have always been difficult for me to make wholeheartedly.

     disorientation
     dɪsɔːrɪɛnˈteɪʃ(ə)n/
     noun
         - the condition of having lost one's sense of direction

Visiting this place usually gives me a sense of groundedness that is less present at home. Slotting myself into the dailiness of life with 2 children; the loving chaos early in the morning; thinking about what to cook for dinner as breakfast is finishing; the school run; the tantrums paired with moments of tenderness. I usually leave with a hollow longing in the pit of my belly; a quiet sense of loss not only at leaving behind 3 people I love: also for the path my life didn't take.

There's a lot of love threaded into this life. Although I don't doubt there is as much in my own, I question whether it is made of the same substance. And nothing here has really changed - it's me that feels more lost this time.

Later, I'm sitting in a bowling alley flanked by a boy's carefully-handmade birthday cake and a pair of arcade games blaring dramatic music, gunshots, grunts, and the name of the game repeated in a deep, masculine voice. A man in a pale blue shirt with sunglasses wedged up on his head walks in. He catches my eye as I'm rearranging my legs and knee-length skirt and smiles at me widely.

I'm reminded instantly of my first lover. He's married now, with a chubby baby and life running predictably along the tracks of the 5-year plan he spoke of when I met him. We wouldn't have fit together, I am sure of it. Yet there it is again, a passing twist in the belly, the drifting question. What would my life be now if I'd chosen different doors? If I'd wanted that other life more?

I know that to a large extent I have the power to choose the kind of existence I want. If I don't want to live in the city any more, I can leave. I can change careers (I've made that transition in the last year without any kind of masterplan). I can choose my friends, how I prefer to relate to people. So much control, and yet none at all. In some moments I feel like a tumbleweed. In others, a chess player orchestrating an entire game.

Today I'm more tumbleweed than mistress of anything, peering at the landscape around me. Although I can see back to where I've come from, I'm not sure if I'm just blowing away from my past choices or moving towards something else.

Life in an angry city

Sydney is an angry city. And today I feel angry too, because it doesn't seem possible to live here and not be impacted by other people's rage, impatience, and lack of consideration.

I lost hours of sleep last night because once again my neighbours put their own comfort and entertainment far above anyone else's needs on the early hours of the hot morning.

On the way to catch a ferry I saw that someone desperate or angry (or both) about getting a park had somehow forced the rear of my car out about a metre from the curb. I almost cried.

It's just a car, just a thing, but it's hard not to feel something about it. To not sense the acrid aftertaste of whatever emotion or intention those now absent people leave on my property, in my little cluster of spaces that are my own.

Travelling anywhere in this city calls for a constant balance between the necessity of leaving the house and avoiding an experience that frays my nerves. Even travelling one suburb over to go to a yoga class is an exercise in stress management. Sometimes just getting to and from the class undoes the benefit of the practice, pulls me harshly out of the post-meditation ease.

I understand that it's possible to choose another reaction. To try to shrug it off, or sink into a numb complacency that "this is how it is". Perhaps even choose to believe that this is a lesson, a gift from the gods to teach me something I lack right now.

Of course it's not everyone. There are other experiences sprinkled in between the bitterness. Sometimes the convenience store cashier will make a point of catching my eye and smiling as he rings up my purchases. Sometimes the bus driver will say "good morning", or "have a nice day", and mean it.

But those who doggedly follow and spout the mantra of 'focus on the positive' have yet to give me a satisfactory solution for what to do with all those grating, very real experiences. Even if I distract myself with other things, other reactions, happy thoughts... they accumulate like sand under fingernails.

I've been here for almost ten years, and only in small pockets of time have I felt like I was truly home. There's been an undercurrent of unease the whole time, a feeling of not quite belonging. I've often said that I want to leave, only I don't know where to. That home is where family is. And it was true, for a time, that was what anchored me here.

But now some of those knit to me by blood have left, in physical and relational ways. My sister is married and lives an hour's drive and $18 in tolls away. My brother has kicked me out of his life. My closest aunt moved interstate. My grandmother is dead. My cousins are all in relationships or marriages and live far away. The family gatherings that once happened regularly have dwindled. Nobody has time.

What is left is an abiding loneliess and quiet grief exacerbated by how disconnected I am from the thousands of people I cross paths with. By all the "we shoulds" that are never followed through.  What I am left with is memories and a few close friends and a lot of sand under fingernails.

So what am I going to do with all this? Write it (I feel calmer already). Speak it (to my friends who understand what it is to be sensitive in this world). Dance it out (I'm on my way right now). And plan, search for a place that will feel like home.

~~~~~

Photograph of an artwork by Tatsuo Miyajima

Dream for my brother

They were coming for you
a They we only knew to run from
I never questioned that I would aid you
I never asked what you had done

I gave you a car to go from us faster
a car that wasn't mine to give
it was the colour of courage
I gave you the colour of strength

when you veered off the highway
the car you drove was white
the colour of beginning, or of death
now wedged in a crack in the earth

I crawled through the wreckage
crumpled at both ends like paper
gathering up your abandoned keys
fat bunches of keys to everything

brother, where are you running to?
do you know what you left behind?
your gods cannot love you as I do
follow them, but take your keys

(2011)

In the night, I dreamed of impossible choices

I dreamed that I was getting married to a man I'd never met.  It was arranged by 'Aunt and Uncle', two archetypal characters in the Mauritian clan which is my father's side of the family (there are no such characters in the waking world, to my knowledge).

I was okay with it, with walking down the aisle to commit myself to a stranger, but everyone around me was shocked.  Not so much about the marriage, but that I, of all people, would agree to such a thing for myself.  This surprised me a little, for those that were the most vocally shocked were those that know me least (cousins, aunts, others with unspecified relationships).  The closer members of my family were present but smudged, slightly faded into the background.

The man I was to marry was unremarkable: neither good looking nor unattractive; dark-skinned, perhaps Indian, perhaps part Mauritian; a little overweight (as am I), a bit rounded in the middle; he had a pleasant smile; seemed kind but not excessively so.  To the audience, he expressed his satisfaction with the match: he knew it was a good one because he desired me (i.e. I was attractive to him).  My waking, roaringly-feminist self would be outraged by such a proclamation (as if that were my most important characteristic... of all the things to say at a wedding, to the woman he was to marry... hiss! glare!) My dream self smiled benignly.

The ceremony passed by without incident: the dream meandered into snippets of my new life with my husband.  I felt pleasantly placid; accepting; unperturbed; calm with a faint overlay of disbelief (as I dreamed I still had some awareness that this was completely out of character with my waking self).

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

My own musings on the dream yielded little by way of meaning.  It wasn't connected to any movies I'd watched, or books read, or conversations.  I mentioned it casually to my mother, dismissed it as just a strange dream.  I still didn't understand it.  As the week went on it sank into my place of forgetting, crowded out by daily life.

Tonight my best friend told me of a dream where she rode on a lion's back.  The lion killed one of her pet rabbits, but she saved the other one.  I consulted my books, searched the internet.  I remembered my own dream suddenly, sought out its meaning while doing the same for hers.

• Am I feeling forced to do something I do not want, reluctantly moving to a new stage of life?  My dream self didn't feel forced.  Perhaps the peculiar calm was born of relief: being relieved of the burden of making such a monumental decision as choosing a life partner.  There's so much to get wrong...
• An unknown man in a woman's dream is a part of her personality which is not recognised.  My  dream self was making an unrecognisable decision to marry a stranger.  That sort of change, the scale of it, is a little terrifying.  What would it take to bring about such a thing in me?  Or is it merely the union of the masculine and feminine aspects of personality?
• Members of the extended family typify the many discernible parts of ourselves. So the discernable parts of me, the known parts, the elements I have nurtured up until now, are shocked by the decisions of my true self?  Do I know myself far less well than I have thought?  
• "To dream of a wedding or marriage can often give an indication as tohow the dreamer feels about relationships".  Then this: weddings reflect how you feel about commitment to other people.  To dream of an arranged marriage means "your approach to commitment needs to be questioned".  Ahh, the sting, the squirm of being forced into honesty with oneself.  I am afraid, vastly, of commitment to a relationship with a man, even if my reasons for it are large and valid and historically accurate.

My contrary dream remains contrary.  I can't settle on one explanation, or even form a constellation of them all.  But some have the flavour of truth, of the beginning of a deep insight I may have not reached in my usual ways.  I can feel the foundations shifting, the knell of change.  Who will I be when the dust settles?

The time it takes to remember

Some people that I love have told me they want less of me in their lives. That I am heavy, holding them back from the dazzling lives they could be leading.  I feel weighted with grief, with slow recovering, with trying to remember and forget. It is the same grief of all women who bear the pain of witnessing.  How can I be buoyant and sparkling when I know too much?

I am afraid that I don't know how to love. Not the dailiness, the living of it, the trust in it.  I can feel it: can crave it, yearn lavishly, give it all my attention.  I am too quick to affection for people I do not yet know, and for those I know too well.  When I leave, when relationships end, I feel no different.  After the hurting and grieving and raging and forgiving, I still feel drawn to them as if by gravity.  I can only stay away by putting distance between us, removing them from my life. I am as helpless as the moon; circling, never touching.

I fear I am guilty of holding onto anger, of nursing my wounds in its heat, for fear that without it the world will be utterly cold, and I will be bereft.  I shield myself with my words and my names for wrongdoings, but I don't know what their opposite is.  I don't know what it means to be loved and unhurt.

How long does it take to recover? How long do we allow people to heal?  It has been 17 years since I first realised that the world is not safe for women and children, not even in their homes.  12 years since I left home and tried to learn the nature of the world for myself.  7 years since I left the haven of university to turn my history into the futures of others; trying to save the world since I could not save myself.

5 years since we got away from my father. Even now he still reaches, grasping, into our dreams, our relationships, cutting us apart.  3 and a 1/2 years since I learned for the first time what it means to be actually relaxed in my own home, to not be constantly waiting for the sound of that car in the driveway; waiting for the cold shoulder to turn back towards me; for the next rage over something I had forgotten.

2 years since I realised, through the ultimate act of intimacy, that I have never been loved by a man. 18 months since my brother left us in a towering rage, only to turn back to the father we tried to save him from.  4 months since I wept uncontrollably, curled tightly on my couch, for learning what a child can be like untouched by the hand of human evil.

How long does it take to recover?  Only the time it takes to remember.  And I have forgotten so much.

On receiving ingratitude

I'm struggling with the concept of gratitude at present. The opposite end of gratitude, receiving it, or lack of it. In particular, how people express it for those that have done the most for us: family, our closest friends.  

It is a reflection of the space that I'm in: a culmination of my life until now, looking back at the decisions that have led me to here. I feel, very much, like being selfish.  You know the song "what about me, it isn't fair..."  Perhaps I'm having a 'thrisis'.  I find questioning the meaning of my life, wondering what makes it matter.  Why have I done the things I've done?  And what will matter from now on?  

By no means do I think it's a right to receive thanks for the things I do for those I love.  If that were my motivation, I would do much less than I do.  But there's a certain sting when someone stands about proclaiming "I did it my way" with no acknowledgement of the sacrifices I have made to help them get there.  

Lao Tzu is credited with saying:

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

I think it is the same with family, with those we love.  Our best work is invisible, when we are helping without proclaiming it, working quietly in the background.  If someone says 'I did it!': job well done supporter-person-you.  This is what I tell myself, the logic I build up around myself.  Ah but the sting, the sting... 

The vomit episode

In February this year I spent a week with my best friend Amy and her boys (my annual trek to South Australia for her birthday).  


The pinnacle of my visit was the night before I was due to travel back home.  I was sitting on the couch, dividing my attention haphazardly between the local tv station and giggling at Facebook updates.  She disappeared for a while, only to return and deposit crying, nappy-clad baby in my lap. 


After only 5 days slotted quietly into her life, I found myself constantly alert for the sound of a baby’s cry, swaying and rocking without thinking about it and adjusting rather easily to the concept that the new centre of my world was this delightful boy child.


So, baby in lap, I immediately commenced rocking, patting, shushing to the best of my ability.


I was standing in the middle of the lounge when it started.   Amy walked past in a bit of a hurry, said ‘I think I know what’s wrong with him’.  A moment later he stopped crying, made a peculiar noise and emitted a small blurp of warm, wet liquid onto my shoulder. 

So far, so good.  I knew babies throw up, I knew clothes could be washed. I considered it a sign of my maturity (not to mention my vast knowledge of parenting) and my love for this little creature to accept the state of things, namely that I had just been vomited on.


Amy trotted over and said ‘you might need this’, and deposited an aptly-named spew rag on my already soaked shoulder.  I was still congratulating myself on being calm in the face of baby spew when she grabbed my elbow and said ‘quick, come out into the hallway’.


I had just stepped off the carpeted part of the floor when Baby anointed me again; this time a deluge.  It ran down my back, under the waistband of my jeans and into my underwear, flowed across my chest into my bra, trickled down my arm, splashed on the floor.


At the time I was quite proud of myself.  I didn’t flinch, I didn’t drop the baby, I didn’t yell ‘EWWWW GROSS!” at the top of my lungs.  I did say, quietly, “I think Aunty Nicole is going to need a shower”.   Amy covered herself efficiently with a towel or two, took Baby from my arms (with a smothered giggle at my facial expression), and I fled to the bathroom, barely keeping down my own dinner. (It was just the smell, and there were bits with texture….)


While in the shower, removing baby vomit from my hair (to this day I don’t know how it got in my hair, on the opposite side to the arm I was holding him with), I was suddenly wracked with guilt.  Here I was hogging the shower, shampooing my hair, having left my best friend sitting in the hallway with a vomit-covered baby.  I hurried to finish the shower and emerged from the bathroom, fresh and apologetic.


While Amy and Baby showered, I cleaned up the floor and did my best to make up for my lapse in selflessness.  As we laughed about it afterwards, she told me that this just meant Baby really loved me.

dreaming in riddles

I had a vivid and peculiar dream the other night. I've consulted my dream books but I'm still trying to figure it all out.... poetry resulted.

dream for my brother

They were coming for you
a They we only knew to run from
I never asked what you had done
never questioned that I would aid you

I gave you a car to go from us faster
a car that was never mine to give
it was the colour of courage
I gave you the colour of strength

when you veered off the highway
the car you drove was white
the colour of beginning, or of death
wedged into a crack in the earth

I crawled through the wreckage
crumpled at both ends like paper
gathering up your abandoned keys
fat bunches of keys to everything

brother, where are you running to?
do you know what you left behind?
your gods cannot love you as I do
so follow them, but take your keys

Dream Meanings - Keys
Colours in Dreams