I don't believe it.

http://www.MayFaireMoon.com


I updated my webpage. Me. All by myself. Without any help, except Frank telling me last week about the "Edit This Page" feature on Netscape. But I added Dani's wedding dress! I did it! I'm so excited I could SPIT!


Now what?

(no subject)

I woke screaming the other night.

I hadn’t fallen completely into sleep, yet. I was just there, hovering. It was 3am; I should have been tired and safely past the point of thinking, but there’s a nasty, perverse creature in my brain that waits, waits, waits til I’m weak and off-guard to strike out at me. And out of nowhere, it’s the same old terror, pulling me up onto my knees in the dark, screaming "NO!" into my teeth until I shoved my face into the pillow just to shut myself up.

I’ve had these terrors since I was a child. Since I was five years old, and I asked my Daddy if he believed in Heaven, and instead of the comforting lie, I got the stark, "no." It’s always the same thing. It’s such a human thing. I’m afraid of dying.

I don’t mean that I’m afraid I’m sick now, or my demise is somehow imminent. I mean to live a long life if G-d will let me, and barring any earthly stupidity. But my vision of death is a great presence, waiting there in the distance, absolutely unavoidable, like the blade at the end of the cattle chute.

I don’t fear pain. I don’t fear the sickness. It’s the utter loss of myself. It’s the thought that the battles I’ve fought so hard to make myself, bone by bone and fiber by fiber and drop of blood by drop, will, in the end, be swept away like the destruction of one of those great colourful sand mandalas.

Such works are, I know, meant to be enjoyed in the creation, with the knowledge that they’re only temporary, that they’ll be gone as soon as they’re complete. But I’m not bright grains on the floor. When I die, what will happen to my experiences?

What about the first novel I wrote, when I was eight, based on that book about the animals left after a great flood? I wrote it on my Dad’s ancient typewriter, sitting in his chair at the dinner table. What about that rush of joy as I ran into my grade school library for the book sale, dollars clutched in my fist, almost overcome with the knowledge I could buy and keep any book there? What about the moment I looked up while brushing my hair behind the booth in Sarasota and saw him standing there, taking my picture, and wondered why? Or the moment I hugged him, late that night, sweaty from dancing and drumming around the fire in the sand, and thought I’d never see him again? What about the moment I got his letter, and the first date? And the night I sat on the side of the bed, staring out over the city, dead inside because I knew what he was going to tell me in the morning?

What will happen to the first time I heard Over the Rhine, with tears sliding down my face at "Poughkeepsie"? What happens to the memories of my mother’s roses in a bowl in the dining room? What happens to the way I loved Tom, the butcher, who died while I was in England, and my parents didn’t tell me because they knew how it would upset me? What happens to the first time I saw myself in my new green gown and almost didn’t know who I was? The echo of the scream as I threw myself across the board with my own broadsword and felt it bite deeply into his? The rabbit I embroidered? The feeling the first time I understood how to draw what I saw, not what I thought I saw? To draw in actuals, not symbols? What happens to the way I stare at sunsets in Bermuda, stars in Lancaster?

What happens to the roil of emotions that afternoon I crawled out to the couch, confused and alone, and cried, and cried, and cried, and the way I know to this day he doesn’t—can’t—understand why?

What happens to the way I spin the rack once the balls are perfectly aligned on the baize, the way Patrick taught me? Or the way I cry every time I hear Tchaikovsky’s pas de deux from Nutcracker? What happens to the way I love roses? What happens to the memories of my parents that no one else has? The way our house smelled in Spring, the way the light used to come down the stairs before the den went up?

Who will remember Kayli, Jenny, Marvin, Patrick, Tom, Glenn, even John, the way I do? Who will remember the way I looked at them?

It always used to be Kayli I called to, hugged fiercely while I whimpered into her fur. She didn’t know why I was upset, she didn’t ask for an explanation. She just flopped beside me on the bed and kept me company while I fought it down. Clue’s too young, still. She doesn’t understand what’s going on, and it distresses her—she’s only ten months old, after all. I can’t explain it to her, and it’s not just the language barrier: I don’t understand the fear, either.

Part of it is the terrible, terrible fear of being alone. Not alone as in how empty my bed is now. Alone in the way that all of us are separate, unable, in the end, to truly touch. That we will all live and die ultimately alone, even surrounded by family and lovers. We first feel it not so long after we separate ourselves from our parents: no one understands me! I’ve been this way for years—no one has ever really understood me. Hell, I don’t even understand me: I’m deeply old-fashioned, yet a bleeding-heart liberal and Goth. Sometimes I run on two different paths and come around a corner only to crash into myself. But I know what I know, and I hold tight to some things; I’m cynical and jaded, I don’t believe love lasts, and I have a terrifying violent streak no one sees, but I believe in love, and equality, and tolerance, and peace, and I will do almost anything for my ideals.

I lost everything I had in inside in my teens: every bit of comfort and normalcy. And I rebuilt myself like so many of us do: I’ve spent the last fifteen years—longer—working on who I am and what that means. And I have, G-d willing, many more years to refine that. So is it any wonder I wake up screaming when that little voice in my head says, "Well, yeah, but what’s the point? I’ll swallow it all in the end."

The stillness, and the blackness terrify me, and it doesn’t matter that I won’t actually know them. Maybe. Perhaps I will. Who knows?

But I’m a control freak, and I can’t stand not knowing. Neither can I stand giving it all up, letting it go, until I’m so much dirt in a hillside somewhere. Don’t talk to me about the Circle of Life, or reincarnation, or heaven. Perhaps I’m fated to be one of those bitter ghosts who won’t go on, who won’t let go of this plane. But maybe I won’t have a choice.

No wonder I wake up screaming. Perhaps it’s only surprising I don’t do so more often.