At Least They're Committed

It’s a line from my book, the one I actually finished, in case you’re wondering. I periodically put lines I’ve written in my books and stories on here and on Twitter so the two who follow me too closely can Google them in hopes of learning from whence they came so they can better understand me. Heh. You can’t. You can’t understand someone who doesn’t understand her- or itself. Though I’m always open to suggestion. Sometimes people tell me things and I see myself more clearly and I am, for a moment or for eternity, enlightened.

“Did you sleep well?” she asks. I had. I’d heard her laughing on the phone with a friend as I’d walked up the stairs. Smiles. I’d awaken at 3 a.m. because I’d forgotten about the new contact lens and my eye ached so I clawed it out of the recesses of my eyeball and encased it in solution. The contact. Not my eye.

“I woke up and went back to sleep,” I say. “I probably should have stayed awake. I had those morning dreams.”

A woman who was a combination of Anna and Amy had cornered a 30-something obese child molester but wanted to bait him further and I kept  quiet although I knew better, knew he had to die, but I followed her lead anyway and things went wrong and her backup, the gun, wouldn’t discharge and he was free, going up the gated elevator, then hunting us. And we fled, seeking sanctuary in my third floor, cement tomb of a Trinidad State Junior College dorm room with the heavy door to be lifted by the both of us before the  dead-bolt and would slide and lock, blue paint chipping off the rusty bolt, stabbing into our collective, broken fingernails. Looking out the window I see my daughter and her friends on the basketball court below and I realize I trusted another and I had put her in peril. I should never trust. Never . . .

“You live in a dark world,” she says to me.

“But I really did sleep well!” I assure her and smile, shifting and straightening, sipping black coffee and sliding my eyes to the bright yellow aspen leaves dancing outside her 10×20 foot picture window. They flutter for my pleasure alone, to pull me back.

I tell her about my visions, the ones that disappear as I awaken and how desperately I try to keep them and how my family chuckles because they’re just “me,” speaking in tongues, but that I know I’ve seen something. I don’t tell her that, strangely, although what I see in that lighted place doesn’t translate to this world, I’m left with tattered, desperate shreds of hope. It’s how He keeps me here.

“Mom!!!” DSII is looking back at me and his face is distraught. “MOM! You OK?” And then he’s laughing. I was just singing ‘Paparazzi’ and ‘I Like It’ with the earphones in. “You’re scaring me!”

Laughing. That wasn’t a dream. He’s just completed Resident Evil 2 and is back on Red Dead Redemption and I should have dropped at least one of the ear buds before singing to my iTunes, out of courtesy.

After taking in the hours of beauty and dog play amid Conifer we go to see Secretariat, which she profusely apologizes and thanks me for because nobody gets blown up or dismembered. I chuckle because it honestly sounds good and it is good — I want to tell her that she looks like Diane Lane because she does . . . but she’s not seeing all that’s beautiful in herself right now and I’m too close to convince her otherwise. It’s like my husband telling me how great I look . . . he just wants to get laid. It means nothing coming from him. If I look so great, doesn’t he think he should look great for me?

No matter. I’m an anomoly. All people make promises. All people start out with dreams. Almost all people are content to get a half way there. I’m not that person.

I’m listening again to Paparrazzi but I’m just mouthing the words. DSII, twisting around cuz he sees my reflection in the big screen TV,  is still laughing at me. I have more than any, any, anyone. It’s not that I want more. It’s that I’m here to do a job and I have to do more.

Heh.