palace of winds

Later I dream of Kacey, whose sister I have been friends with since we went to preschool together. In my dream Kacey works in a bakery, set up like the Mrs. Field’s or the Fanny Farmer in my mall at home: long glass cases like you would see at a Baskin Robbin’s (ice cream) filled with cakes and cookies. She is just opening the store, and she promises me some cake, and I look over all of these perfect chocolate cakes and red velvet cakes and I want to choose them all.

Then, somehow, I am dreaming of making a car. There were other people there too, on my team, but I don’t remember who. We have a large single-axle trailer whose sides are made of something metallic, perhaps aluminum, and we are going to transform this into our stealth car (someone briefly mentions painting teeth on it, shark-like) which we will enter in the upcoming race. But, according to the rules, it has to be within certain dimensions, which means we are going to have to take a few feet off of either the front or the back of it. While we are deciding which end, I wake.

I dream, briefly, of watering my plants. The water runs over the top edge of Salome’s pot like a waterfall, and when I lift her (the water coming up my wrists) it is trickling out of the drainage hole too, catching the light.

“and what’s the future, who will choose it?
politics of love and music
underdogs who turn the tables”

- Dar Williams

I am already so sick of talking about this war that I could spit, yet I can’t seem to escape it. The images of crumbling buildings, sharp buckling steel, a sheet of smoke. People dangling from windows and then dropping, dark and heavy. Buildings giving up, their shoulders falling in, their knees dropping to the street, wilting. I imagine the slow, sick descent, hiding in the blackness beneath a strong oak desk, maybe living in that prison for days. Breathing in bits of powdered cement as the dogs search the thousands of tons of wreckage above.

Perhaps this is insensitive to say, but I follow the old adage that you rid yourself of something only by speaking of it. Maybe if I say it enough these images will not cut my mind so sharply. Dr. —– told me a few days ago that children and some elderly have trouble with time, so with every clip of that morning new buildings are collapsing in their understanding. But she also thinks that somewhere, on a more primitive layer, we still have the reasoning of children, and so there is a part of us that does not understand replay. I believe that. I believe somewhere a little corner of me is scared, silent with terror, convinced all the important buildings in America are dropping one by one by one.

I wonder where my little pint of blood is now. Just one more plastic package of O+ to throw at a trauma, someone bleeding out, someone pulled up from some tangle of a burnt building. All this careful, self-important cycle from heart to lungs through limbs, all this oxygen-gathering.

Everyone screaming for a bloodbath in Afghanistan makes me very sad and very nervous. I don’t know what the answer is, and I don’t pretend to. But I wish I felt like someone is trying to make a moral decision in all of this. That someone up there in the lofty halls of government is thinking about the innocent people there too, is weighing their hearts in the balance pan. (And not finding them lighter than American hearts, any less human.)

More and more it is futile to shape this dread with words.

“Then Jack he falls.
Jill, she follows after.
Will it end in tears,
Will it all be laughter?”
- from “Stananivy,” by Kate Rusby

I need to stop writing entries early in the morning, because it confuses me as to whether this is today or yesterday. I have enough trouble keeping my head on straight without the added inconvenience of not having a language that can describe my sleeping schedule.

Today we had no classes, so I went to the memorial service held this morning on the quad. I knew I should not have gone. For once it was not that I would rather sleep. I knew it would be hard, because as much as I fight it I am a crier. I blame this on both of my parents, but I have not yet been able to fix it. My big triggers are other people crying and certain songs.

I have always liked Amazing Grace, but since that horrible February it is one of the songs I try to tune out when in commercials or background noise. Hell, I try to tune it out all the time (along with the Battle Hymn and a Jesus song whose name I can’t remember). I was blue-around-the-edges sad when I went, not viscerally. It is seated deeper than that now, its muffling weight spread evenly and softly, making itself another permanent fixture near my heart. When they sang Amazing Grace, though, it did not matter what kind of sad I was, or that there was no rhyme or reason or dropping in my stomach. But this is why I went with Stephie, and this is how we (horribly) became a photo op for some jerk-off photographer.

Ah well. What more is there to say? It’s nearly four and I have no words left to throw at this week, at least not publicly. I feel ill from all the food I ate tonight, whipped and otherwise. I am tired and I do not want to go to war.