8:05 p.m. - 03/19/02
you and your preconceived notions about sentence structure.
I'm way too out of it (and uninteresting?) to be writing right now. It's been a lackluster day, although there have been some small miracles. I'm not sure why they constitute miracles, other than that somehow today I ended up in my room thinking that I'm lonely again, I've been too philosophical, I need to just walk in the woods and be dirty and windswept - but of course, it rained steadily all day, and though the prospect of playing in the rain intrigued me, I came up with several "rational" reasons not to act on the impulse.
Silly girl. I'll do it next time- when it's an electrical storm and I've invested in some spectacular kite.
I'm up to Fables and Reflections in the Sandman series, which hopefully will get my oldest brother off my back. It kind of creeps me out that he recommends these to me. The myth is fabulous, of course, but they're so graphic, and I have trouble with them...and I have trouble with the source that offers them and...ah, well, the myth is fabulous.
Even if I did get sufficiently pissed when A Game Of You seemed so oddly anti-trans. I was already worked up when I remembered an IM conversation I had with Jared a long while back regarding the stupidity of Wanda not being able to take the moon's path. My mind jumped around a lot because of it - like to one of the small stands we had to take against closed-minded policies at my old school, when I asked Scott why on earth I cared so much and he said, "because some day it could be you." And I wondered if that will ever fully make sense to me. If there will be some great 'surprise' meaning - as in, one day it will be me *in* that scenario exactly, not just a parallel reality but that reality itself. And then I remembered that none of it matters, and what it really comes down to is people. Peoples is peoples. Peoples is small miracles.
Ruth wrote me today. (RUTH...) And in her writing she said "Your story is really an inspiring one, and I am continually impressed by your courage." Courage...! There is seriously nothing better than being told you're brave. In terms of epithets, I think it's my favorite. Though Rosie told me once I was a sacred spirit, and that was quite the gift.
Anyway, to continue with this incoherence, Ruth in general, and her words specifically, were a small miracle in the midst of my loneliness and lacking purpose and feelings of disconnectedness today. My second (and perhaps more mindblowing miracle) was the sudden realization that I have contact info for three RED people I didn't realize I had. That means I can find out how three girls are doing, and maybe put my heart at ease a little. It's odd; I know that finding out someone isn't doing well will upset me...but at the same time I feel a thousand times better thinking that I might *know* they're not doing well (or are) than only being allowed to wonder. I'm not good at hanging in oblivion, perhapsing.
I've been thinking about the belief systems we construct to survive living. And I've begun to wonder if distance isn't just another idea we tell ourselves is real in order to provide the illusion that we're separate from old feelings. I don't say this to be prophetic because it isn't a truth I own, but rather a truth I stumble toward. It is my own constructed survivalist belief: the belief that perhaps (*perhaps*) the idea that people come and go in life isn't real. Maybe the world is far less divided then we make it seem- with our classes and our countries and our orientations...Maybe my memory isn't separate from my reality, my daydreams aren't separate from my experiences, and this life is not separate from my other ones...
You see we all have to come up with beliefs to help us get through things: religious, scientific, political or otherwise, and what's so wrong about knowingly admitting that they might all be hogwash, but they help? It helps me, right now, to think that my existence is essentially similar to a dream: I am a plane on which every person in my life can meet, where redloves and NYloves can embrace as long-term comrades without all these obstacles of "time" and "mileage" and "death."
Which brings me to the very confusing possibility that A Game Of You (the infuriating, disappointing installment in the otherwise impressive series Dale forces me to read) is also in a way my favorite collection thus far. I don't like some of the implications it makes, but, like all of his work, it was brilliant...and somehow, between the Death books and the Barbie-Wanda exchange at the gravestone...Neil Gaiman is doing a whole lot more good for my grief process than Elizabeth Kubler Ross could ten times over.
So shoobah. Courage.
chord
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