“Only knowledge removes …fear. If we were shown the whole truth, we could not stand it. Both lovely and horrible truths make us human, and when knowledge threatens to show us our follies, we may realize that we are not ready to leave them behind. Then the veil closes again, and we sit meditating before it, trying to prepare ourselves for the moment when we dare to part the curtain completely.”

~~Deng Ming-Dao
~~On Knowledge

It’s morning and I am sitting over breakfast in my cave. I never open the front shutter in the morning, because I don’t relish the thought of my neighbors clomping by with a full view of my hair standing on end, braless in an old lumpy sweater. I have already washed the last of my bedding and towels that I can wash and hung them on the rickety drying rack in the Spanish sunshine.  I’ve begun to pout about this rented apartment with no view of the sea. I’ve begun to feel trapped in this place on the first floor where people walk by the pool …sandwiched in with no view but the blinding white apartment block across the street, mostly shut up, because it is winter. I sleep all over what feels like a kind of  Spanish Florida of this rented apartment with no view of the sea. I started out sleeping in the preferred small bedroom …the neighbor next door snored through the cheap walls. I moved to the more imposing master bedroom and gave that a whirl …didn’t like that because I couldn’t read in bed …the lights with the quaint dimness of a Europe long past. After a hail storm one night, all the lights went out and woke me up …I stumbled to the living room and slept on the sofa. I guess you could say, I have been sleeping around.

I have been sitting over my tea this morning. The jasmine pearls have opened in the clay pitcher I make tea in …a perfectly glazed, common brown pitcher that has perhaps known a lovely summer’s day sangria for two. I have drunk three times from the unfurling leaves and, soon, limp and tasteless, they will end in the plastic bag from the grocery store that I use for garbage and have a dead tea leaf walk to the basura. I drink my tea from a cheap glass. Sometimes, I hold the glass next to the bridge of my nose against my cheek for the warmth and the scent of the jasmine secretly travels through me like a powerful dream. Dreams …that is what I want to tell you about …my dreams. The landscape of my hours of unrest have resembled my sleeping throughout the house …frightful chaos …I am never still in the dark world. I pick fading roses in places that just don’t seem right …I live in houses of terrible construction that are in imminent danger of falling apart …sometimes several at a time. Sometimes I don’t know which one I am living in. I never live in the old fairytale house with the pitched roof and the two towering trees, but I see it in my dreams.    It has a tattered roof and nothing is as it seems. A terrible wind blows and I know the shingles will blow off the house, but I don’t feel a sense of relief that it is sold and gone.

Old lovers trail through the empty house …they look at me with disdain and won’t speak. Friends die and I am shocked at their passing. I have three cars and they are all breaking down. It costs so much to fix them, but they are mine and are dragging me down. It’s Christmas …I go on a date with a man I can’t remember …a prom in a local suburb. I wear a strapless, yellow chipao. I am comfortable in the dress, but the gloves are ugly until I discover they are inside out …on the right side they are black and suddenly I am no longer wearing yellow, but black. My date doesn’t work out. My mother, father and grandmother have a walk through this dream. Secretly, they are spurring me on …helping me to put the pieces of my life together. I go out with another man …a kind of slight, non-discrept fellow… my mother asks us to go to St. Mary’s. I say, “I didn’t take the Romanian lines. It was just too sad, the passing of the generations. I never had any children.” The slight man takes all of this in …my yellow chipao/black clothing date …what I say to my mother …he gives me sidelong, knowing glances.

I travel to Mongolia with a dead friend‘s son and his partner. They are going there to be doctors.. We sleep in a motel in a Mongolian strip mall with a bank. Somewhere in the dream they disappear, and I am changing money at the bank. I always have the wrong money in the wrong country. I can’t change anything.

I am going to be married. I visit the apartment of a younger man …a lover to tell him I am getting married, but I don’t end up telling him. Suddenly it is the day of the wedding. I have no dress …I think that maybe I will wear my old wedding dress, but end up with an ugly white dress like a flour sack with hand cutwork at the bottom. I don’t have a wedding cake, and I need to bake brownies. It’s all too much …its just too late.

My friends visit me in China and Spain …there is always something wrong with their tickets …their connections. I live with strange families.  I am always packing and unpacking …sorting and throwing away …sorting and keeping …moving to another chaotic place. I always get out of the old place in the nick of time.

I moved through my days just like a snail leaving a translucent trail …a sad, incandescent  purple and turquoise as I walked by the sea. I am still often tired from “the year of the furrowed brow,” that year of resigning jobs …writing endless, boring reports …repairing, then selling a house …negotiating a job in China … sorting through the things of my life, saying goodbye …

 …and, then, there have been these nights of chaos. Should I even wonder why I am tired? I stop the useless interrogation of myself about why I am the way I am and muster up some courage instead.  I had a day of a thousand small creative acts beginning with searching for a biological specimen in the refrigerator …a zucchini!!! I cut off the bad parts and made a zuchini bread without a recipe with a lemon I picked from Hermione’s tree and a nutmeg I bought from the sweet, Moroccan spice merchant in the market. As I walked on the paseo yesterday, I began to look for things as my mother had been so conscious of …the tiny, inconsequential things that gave her life meaning. I had an appreciation for her task. Before I saw the tiny, yellow wild flowers like snap dragons near the sidewalk and the pots of snake plants outside of a restaurant, I passed by a pile of dog shit, a discarded orange key tag, an angry red graffiti penis ejaculating along the wall of the paseo …the jetsam and flotsam of peoples’ walking lives near the sea. As I walked along, it came to me that I have not let go of my old life. I know I don’t have it anymore, but I hold on to it by the sorting out, the discarding, the keeping. Have I given away too much? Need I give away more?

 

 

 

I fell into a peaceful sleep that night. Near morning I had a dream. I was driving through the desert. It seems like it might have been sunset. The desert was alight with red and purple fire and there were deep shadows in the canyons. On a bluff there was a huge pino piñonero …an umbrella pine of the Mediterranean. It had just been planted. Its powerful branches had been pruned. They were bare. But within itself I knew the tree was so alive …it was merely waiting for rain …and then it would grow majestic …first the fragrant branches …then the full shape …the wind singing its will-of-the-wisp song through its branches.  Some time today, I will eat the tiny mandarinas of winter’s Spain …just like my mother who gloried in “the beauty of tiny oranges upon a painted plate.” Later, I will go to a local restaurant with Hermione and have a look at the waiter over lunch. He is young and tall, his handsome looks surpassed only by his winsome sweetness …a spirt alive that  he will pass on to me through his smile and his kindness.

In the meantime, I wait for rain.