Box of Rain

Dream last night: I'm in a grocery store and my first-ever boyfriend sees me and asks if he can put me down as a reference for a job he's trying to get as a school-teacher.  His voice and the cadence of his speech is spot-on to real life.  I notice in shock that he only has one arm - his right arm ends below a thin bicep.  I don't ask how he lost an arm.

The book I'm reading this morning - Wild, a memoir by Cheryl Strayed (excellent so far) has a chapter called Box of Rain.  And I remember that old phase of my life, when I knew all the words to a song like Box of Rain. When it seemed significant that the Allman Brothers had a song containing my name.  When I wore long skirts and burned incense and dated the much-older hippy guy who thought so many things were beautiful and said so.

Yesterday the ring I've worn every day since 8th grade (minus a brief re-sizing at the jeweler) broke as I was doing laundry.  The prongs caught and the garnet gemstone rocketed out and has not been found.  It left an empty socket of a ring with only prongs.  It looked like a weapon, or a sea creature.  The ring was a gift from my grandmother who's been dead for many years.  In eighth grade it was the nicest thing I'd ever been given, and I felt like a princess wearing a real gemstone.

I had feared the gemstone got displaced when I resized the ring and they persuaded me to buy a new stone.  The old one was too scratched, they said.  The new gem was a garnet like the old, but the ring looked different when I got it back.  I had asked the jeweler to look at it again and make sure it was secure, and she told me it was.  I knew it was not secure.  I could have taken it in to get fixed but I never did.  Do you want to know how absurd women's relationships with their bodies are?  In the midst of a wave of terrible thoughts about The Ring Incident, I had a flash of self-hatred where I told myself that if my fingers and whole damn body hadn't gone and gotten so big and fat since eighth grade, I never would have had to change the ring and its stone would have been secure and I would still have it on my naked finger that I keep touching in distress that something's missing.  I quickly reminded myself that it is absurd and sad to think that anyone would or should stay the same size they were in eighth grade.  My right hand is smooth and strange to me.

Two more days at my current job, and then a whole new phase will click into motion like a new gear on a ten-speed bike.  I kind of want to buy an opal and put it in the old prongs.  Maybe it's time for something new.

Wanting and knowing

Had a dream last night that I've had before and which highlights an odd thing about being married.  I am somewhere, and there's some vague guy, and I just know he's into me.  I can feel it in the air.  He wants me, and I know it, and he knows I know it.  It's those moments before anything at all even happens when it just hangs in the air like when you know it's going to rain.  And that's the whole dream. 

I wake up knowing that I am happily married and remembering that that is a feeling I've had in my past.  I don't get that feeling any more, ring firmly on increasingly-chubby finger.  I'm thrilled to not be dating.  But it's kind of nice to visit that feeling in a dream.  Few things are like that feeling.  Love is stronger and more important, but it doesn't feel like standing on that precipice.

The last time I had that feeling in real life was on my first date with my husband.  If this were a fairy tale, we would be having these dreams about each other, but I guess that's not the way it works.

Zombies

After playing Plants Vs. Zombies on my phone before bed, I literally had dreams about the plants and the zombies and the music.  That slow, plodding zombie walk in my head all night!  Plan: tonight, I read a nice novel before bed and dream of more buffaloes running through flowers.

In other news: I seem to have, um, asthma.  Just not enough air in my lungs these days.  I should probably do something about this.  And I woke up with my ovaries hurting, so now I'm paranoid there are cysts acting up.  I know, you were just dying to know that.

Elysian fields

Source

to the Elysian plain…where life is easiest for men. 

No snow is there, nor heavy storm, nor ever rain, 

but ever does Ocean send up blasts of the shrill-blowing West Wind 

that they may give cooling to men.

— Homer, Odyssey

  "In no fix'd place the happy souls reside. In groves we live, and lie on mossy beds, By crystal streams, that murmur thro' the meads: But pass yon easy hill, and thence descend; The path conducts you to your journey's end.” This said, he led them up the mountain's brow, And shews them all the shining fields below. They wind the hill, and thro' the blissful meadows go.
— Virgil, Aeneid

I had a very vivid dream on Friday night that there were buffaloes running fast in fields of flowers along the side of rolling mountains.  As far as the eye could see, there were mountains covered in flowers, with occasional groves of trees.  The buffalo in front of me was in lavender, but there were also white and red flowers in patches nearby.  It was so beautiful and sunny.  I ran behind the buffalo on a flat strip of flower-covered land sticking out from the side of the sloping mountain. It felt so good to run! I felt fantastic, and so happy and light.  I ran faster and faster in the beautiful flowers.  A voice in my head said "Elysian fields," and then the dream ended.

Last night on Sunday I dreamed that someone told me, "Your writing is disconnected from the power source."  I was offended, and then I woke up in pain.