5: What remains?

I sleep on Kris’ side of the bed now. We used to sleep with our spines pressed against each other.  There have been times between dreams that I’ve thought he was is in bed with me, moments I’ve reached for him or tried to hook my leg around his the way he hated.

One night a few weeks ago I took off all my clothes and put on his leather jacket inside out with its skin against my skin.  I stood in the dark and stared at myself in the hallway mirror, my chubby legs white and soft as brie.

“Go fuck yourself,” I said to my reflection.  I dared the mirror to break and let me through.

“You look like a crazy old lady,” my reflection said back.

I did look crazy.  I looked fucking crazy.  My hair was a nest of wild, greasy frizz, my eyes were blotted with days-old black makeup and my eyelids swollen, my tits drooping down like they were trying to escape from my chest and get away from this mess once and for all.  And I was wearing an enormous, inside-out leather jacket.

“You are really going to town right now,” said my reflection.

“Well, your jacket is ugly,” I said.

The jacket was ugly.  Huge, bulky, too long.  It was the ugliest jacket that has ever happened. I never liked it on Kris.

“You look like a flasher,” I would tell him.

“I look great! I love this jacket,” he would say.

I tried to wear the jacket to bed that night, but sleeping in inside-out leather turned out to be the opposite of cozy, so I took it off and hung it on the closet door. But then the moonlight was coming through the window and the jacket looked like a giant creepy floating monster with no head, so I ran to the wall and flicked on the lights, took the jacket and threw it out into the hallway and ran back to my bed.  I kept the lights on, tried to read a book.

—

I like the idea of running away.   Just really fucking off, taking my kids and becoming a gypsy, making stews of berry and squirrel and feeding my babies from my throat like a mother bird.

—

I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.—My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable.

Is Wuthering Heights a good book to read for the fifty thousandth time in the middle of the night after you’ve just been creeped out by your dead husband’s jacket seemingly floating in mid-air?  I pictured myself as a ghost roaming like Cathy through the moors, except I would roam around Quadra and Mckenzie, and I’d ride a skateboard.

Then I had an idea.  It was a really, really good idea.  The best thing, the very best thing you could possibly do right now, I told myself, would be to spend the next three hours until Eli wakes up signing up for every single internet dating site in the whole wide world.

OKCupidPlentyofFishMatch.comeHarmonyTinder.

There was a skull-crushing loneliness happening that night, and I felt like my house was squeezing in on me, the rooms shrinking.  I was Giant Alice manically toggling between emails Kris wrote me and the dating accounts I was creating, trying to neutralize the sadness with every profile.

—

Tell us a little about what you’re looking for in the space below 

(it increases your chances of getting contacted!)

Looking for a basement druid person who likes making kombucha, organic gardening and basket weaving and yet who also makes rap music and does penis graffiti and throws garbage in his neighbours’ yards.  That’s not who I want to date, I just want to know if that person exists. 

—

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Kris  <kris@email.com> wrote:

I don’t know what you think of me, sometimes, Chelsea.  I don’t feel like I live in this world.  I yearn so deeply for a closer connection, and it’s so hard to find it.  I don’t care about anything that most people care about.  I don’t feel connected.  But when I’m with you, I do. Will you love me, darling?  I love you.  I think you love me, too.

I think the universe will guide you to what you need, if you are open to it.  And it guided me, to you.  And that is such a vulnerable thing to say, because if you were to say, ‘no’, then it wouldn’t be true.  It would be just me, chasing a dream, of you.  Each day, each day, I am vulnerable with you.  Each day, you can say, ‘no’.  Even when, my wide-open heart pleads for ‘yes’. I adore you.  And you’ll never scare me away.

And in this song, ‘Sweet Disposition’, I am indeed the runner.  Always trying to reach you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxKjOOR9sPU

I’m so torn with the Buddhist ideal of letting go of all attachments.  I can’t do  it.  I know it’s right, but it feels so wrong.  To let go of them all, all the people I love.  I can’t let them all go.  I can let most of them go, but not all.  I keep forming a stronger attachment,  to you.  And I don’t want to let it go.

There was a good sequence in Jacob’s Ladder.  Here’s the link:

The extended sequence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPP1HREMacI

The part I care about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt3Ny_BG3yQ

—

What are YOU fishin’ for?  Tell us in the space below 

(it increases your chances of getting a hook in your cheek!)

I don’t want to be cremated. I want to be buried in case someone ever wants to dig me up and cradle my bones.

Also, I’m 5’7 and curvy.

—

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 7:10 PM, Kris  <kris@email.com> wrote

Yeah, you’re right, there is something very romantic and beautiful about quadriplegic robot sex.  I never thought of that.  I am, now.  I don’t think it’s creepy, at all.  It’s a bridge, a way to touch, where the bridge was washed out, seemingly forever.  It’s hope, and intimacy across a chasm.  It’s something they may now can have, if only partially.  The sensuality, at the moment, when it comes to touch, flows in only one direction.  But the rest of the feedback, and intimacy, would still be there.  If they were open to it.  I think it could be beautiful. I think it’s only a matter of time before the feedback flows the other way, with this tech.  And I don’t think it’s that much time, either.  I think if Christopher Reeve had another 20 or 30 years, he’d be able to feel himself touching his wife, as she touched him.  I think we’re that close.

I told you I wanted to be as sincere as possible with you.  Here’s something sincere, that I’ve been keeping to myself:

I’m afraid to go back to school, for a PhD.  I’m afraid that I may have nothing to contribute, after all.  Like the fear of going to a party, perhaps, and finding that no one is interested in what you have to say.  That all of your observations and comments are boring, obvious.  It’s a new fear of mine, at least in that I haven’t known it since adolescence.  I don’t know what to do with it. It’s like being the shy kid, at school, overhearing a conversation that excites you.  But not knowing how to jump in.

The men and women having that conversation seem like giants, to me.  And I, I still feel like a kid.  I fear revealing my own naïveté, since there are aspects of the conversation that I don’t have the background to comprehend.  And I fear that once that is exposed, I’ll lose the chance to participate, and be left playing with the toys that others create.

This, for example:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/medical-robots/monkeys-control-computer-with-thought

The brain seems to be inherently equipped to accept new interfaces.  And this implies so much that is exciting, and terrifying, and barely discovered, all by itself.  A great deal will come of this research, just this.  It’s transformational, this discovery.  It’s reveals that perhaps every neuron in our brain is a hand, able to shake hands with the universe.  That our senses have been merely the best our bodies could offer, so far.

And it compels me to think I may be able to sense you in other ways, than the ways we have sensed each other so far.  Right now, it is your recorded voice, through the air, to my ears.  It’s looking at your email, and knowing it’s the consequence of your thought.  It’s remembering the smell of you, and your hand on my chest.  It’s imagining a deeper communication, and feeling you through your eyes and lips.

Have a lovely day, tomorrow.

-K