Day 29, Something Is Washing Over Me

(Authors note:  I tried not to edit this too much, so some sentences may be long winded, like the thoughts, running together, sometimes amok, with feeling shooting off in different directions.)

Texas is getting pummeled with rain and flooding from, of all names, Hurricane Harvey. Harvey was my father’s name. I asked Emilee if she could help at all. Her friends in Texas sure would appreciate it. I blew my rams horn in the hopes that God might hear the call. And while the deluge ensues there, something is washing over me today. And the service for Maureen, Marcia’s friend, was this morning, with abundant sunflowers adorning each side of the urn. Sunflowers, the happy flower. The heroes of my last post.

August 29, 2017, Day 29 of the Birthday Month

This got more intense when preparing dinner for one tonight. I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to have someone with whom to share some good food (and for once, I have waaaaay too much food in my fridge).

Someone to share with. Someone to feel with. Someone to embrace and be embraced by. And then the intensity just whoooooshed over me like the wave crashing, or better, when the deep freeze storm marched over the city in that movie (The Day After Tomorrow, Dennis Quaid) and everything froze so cold that many things just lost all molecular vibration as the crackling of complete sub-freezing temperatures surrounded all objects that were exposed, and a person could not survive that, not on the surface, underground yes, like the library where his son managed to survive with others. A library, books, knowledge, thought, reason, emotions, art, wonder, curiosity, knowledge.

For whatever reason, today just has had a bunch of sad moments, looking back….looking forward….and trying to stay in the present…sometimes the ache of loneliness is such an all-encompassing emotion that seems to just fill my entire being…my instinct is to distract from it and think of other things, do other things, feel other things and other feelings, but I know that is avoidance of something I need to feel for whatever reason and to try to move around it instead of through it is not a healthy thing for me…

So I am staying with it for whatever it takes…two minutes, two hours, two days, I don’t know yet, I just know I have to walk in it and through it and at some point I will emerge on the other side, and I know it is a good thing to allow that and then to let it go… but it sure is an intense sadness, one I haven’t felt for some time…whewwwwwwww…it does help to speak about it, and by speak I mean write, at least at this moment…somehow it gets it out of my head, out of this reverberation within my body and helps it to calm down a bit…

See, I am a feeler and also a thinker by nature…. I have intense feelings, have had this kind of sensitivity since I was very young…I guess it is a gift, and no, it is not a curse, it is a gift which enables me to not only feel but then to also think about what I am feeling, and to express it in some way, whether in song, movement, words, writing or poetry. Beautiful things come from deep sad soulful places, so ultimately it is a gift to feel, but it sure does hurt sometimes, a hurt I think a lot of people feel, a hurt of being so alone, a hurt of just feeling alone, and you can’t…I don’t think I can…learn to be with someone else unless I intimately understand my own sense of aloneness…

Until and unless I walk thru that for myself, and I know the depths of my own feelings, my own complete naked aloneness, can I feel my connection to the earth, to the ground, to the water running beneath the earth, to the air and the sky and clouds, until I feel the anguish of separateness, the free fall of nothing, no attachments, no connections. Of a soul crying for embrace, for enfolding arms of love, and yet finding strength in feeling roots growing from my feet to the earth, and earth’s lifeblood of pure water flowing into my pores to hydrate my blood, air surrounding my skin bathing me in a sea of molecular gases swirling around an alphabet soup connecting me to every other living and non-living substance on this planet…

Until I feel the freefall disconnection and reconnection as if the earth is catching me in a spider web of glistening strands of fine silk webbing, slowing my fall, embracing me, bringing me home, nestling me in her arms and soothing me, comforting me…pulling me into her chest…until I feel all this, or once I feel all this, then can I finally say, I know the depths, I know the terror, I have seen, felt, smelled, tasted, the abyss and I can survive…I am not so desperate for another human to catch me or comfort me…

I want to hold someone’s hand though, I want someone to dance with me…I need to know how to dance before I reach for someone’s hand and ask them to dance with me…I want to know at least the basic steps and some of the more advanced ones as well…I want to be able to lead, as well as follow…I want to be comfortable doing both…but I need to know I can lead when I want to …and feel confident about it…and I first have to be able to dance by myself, and to love it without the fathomless ache for a partner, I have to love being free to dance, I have to know my dance, I have to dance it reasonably well, before I pull someone from the sea to dance with me…

And if I do not learn my own dance first, I won’t have that look that Max Schmirovsky has when he is dancing with a partner, they glide, cutting through the air like one, then two, then one again, in this sweeping, swirling, undulating rhythm that is both sensual and somehow full of peace, and beauty, and a love born of movement of two moving as one, two moving in a practiced balance of synchronization and flowing that is born of repetition of knowing and being comfortable with the other person.

Do I feel any better yet? Or did I just distract myself by writing? Writing is, like music is also, amazingly cathartic. I don’t think this was a distraction. I think it is a working through the emotions. Feeling them and not avoiding them. It seems to work for me. My emotions, and my handling of them, are, as I am, a work in progress.

 

Neal Klein
Life After Emilee, on the loss of my wife to pancreatic cancer. I’m not accepting comments right now but please feel free to get in touch via my Contact page.