Sam just told us the haunting story of seeing his mother for the first time since he got back. She got out of the hospital yesterday. She is very sick, delusional, hallucinating. The way Sam tells stories... there�s no way to describe it.. But when he walked into his parent�s house it was like a painting: his parents� old oak bed in the living room, sunset coming in the window, his frail mother lying there, his brother dressed in black sitting in a chair behind the bed, looking upset and biting his nails.
But his mother looked like an angel and talked like a prophet. She said, �I spent the night in Corvallis last night, in a hut.� She said, �Why are those dolls on that lamp?� Sam said, �What do they look like? How many are there?� She counted to twelve. She said, �A bug just crawled across the air and into your nose. And then it happened again.� Sam said, �Tell me more about that.� And she said, �It probably wasn�t real.� She told him about the cobwebs on the wall that were moving with the wind, the dream she had every night about a room covered in dust. She asked, �Who�s your friend?� (No one else was there).
Sam�s brother and father were freaking out about the �delusions,� but he explored them. She said, �I know I�m seeing things that aren�t real.� And Sam said, �No, I think you�re just more creative than I am right now. How do you know they aren�t real?� And she said, �You know, I�ve never really believed in science anyway.� Then she said, �I saw your girlfriend from afar.� �Which girlfriend?� �One I haven�t met yet. One you haven�t met yet.� She slipped in and out of lucidity and everything she saw in the room was like unwrapping a piece of a dream. He is going to take us there to see her, because she might die soon. I just want to hear what she sees.
Then he took out the presents, his gems collected over the years that were at his parents house. He gave Donna a Chinese fan and he gave me a beveled glass vase. He opens dusty boxes with eyes twinkling and slips out treasures, incomprehensible, intricate, unfolding secret histories of the sea and the city and old rooms and boxes and chairs. Then the set of plates in a basket, wrapped in newspaper, each one painted with trees and birds. Each box contains another box contains another box. Each time he opens one a dream flies out.
I swear the things we bring into our life are just getting more amazing, and I don�t mean things, I mean, these pieces of our world, dropping from the sky.
Donna and I walk around feeling beautiful. Donna thinks we�re getting more beautiful. We don�t know why. It�s a feeling, a glimmer. I used to feel uncomfortable walking through a department store among the glittering counters and pristine salespeople. Now I feel like a floating mystery, stepping deliberately and looking, just looking wide eyed. No one knows. I live in a dream.
I have the strangest feeling about this boy I�m in love with. I am so sure that what we�re doing is absolutely right and I feel this amazing pull towards him. Also, I feel like I could just walk away, right now, and never look back. And I hold these two thoughts in my head at the same time. I think it�s the best way to love someone. Pure.
I had this theory about two kinds of happiness. One is a pure blinding white light. The other is an unbelievably intricate fractal of intersecting colors. When I was with Gabe, at the very beginning, I had the pure blinding kind of happiness. It took me so long to accept that it would never come back. The way I got over him was to build up this pattern of beauty and practice and action that intersected and refracted and gave me extreme joy.
When I was in California, briefly, I had the white kind of happiness again, the kind where it doesn�t matter if you eat or sleep or endure extreme pain or have your normal comforts, none of it matters because this white happiness just wells up in you all the time.
In Portland I usually build up my joy with both repeated and anomalous actions, practices I�ve collected over the years that make me who I am. A rainbow of details that I love.
But just recently, I stopped being interested in those things. I can�t read a book, or a newspaper, they don't interest me. Input is irrelevant. I don�t give a shit about my morning ritual anymore. Or any of those rituals that caused me joy. I don�t care about waking up early. I don�t care about anything, because I have that pure white happiness again. And it might be from being in love, but I think it has less to do with him that it has to do with me, because all that interests me now is creating: creating art, creating experience, just thinking, walking, looking, writing, creating art out of life.
Last night I was... not really bored... just in an extended daydream. I didn�t feel like reading and everyone else was asleep. All I was doing was thinking, anyway, so I got in bed early, at 10. Then the sleep paralysis started. It was so much worse, because I haven�t had it for so long. Over and over, I kept shaking myself out of it and then my body would just slip back into paralysis. It was terrifying. And I was hallucinating and hearing voices way worse than before. People talking. People I don�t know, and I can�t remember what they said. I heard symphonies in my head, then the music would go wrong and stutter to a stop. I heard him behind me saying, �I�m really tired, I�m just going to get in bed with you.� But my body was paralyzed so I couldn�t turn around to see if he was really there. But I knew he wasn�t, somehow. Voices. This rushing sound. What a strange night.
Today Donna and I walked to Dot�s to have a drink (I love saying �to have a drink�). And spicy fries with tofu dip that we shared. There was something Donna said when she accidentally dropped a fry in the dip... a butchered Anne Carson quote... �The forms, the harrow, the spicy fries. Something shattered inside the tofu dip.� And we could not stop laughing forever, tears streaming down my face. Something shattered inside the tofu dip. Oh my fucking god. So funny to be in the same consciousness as someone, know all the same quotes, understand.
real quote: �The forms, the harrow, the stranger in it. Something shattered inside the words we use. Love? If two lie together they have heat. Lover? Good lover. Better lover. Love being your lover. One of the best lovers I ever. Better than aubergine. Had. Had. Had. Stop the box.�
I could just walk away. Is that love? You exist. I exist. Pulling exists. The music drifting in from the next room, whimsical twinkling singing like a carnival. I am the thing that goes on.