One Fine Day

Sometimes abstinence does not cure. As good old Freud pointed out, whatever we suppress rises to the surface. If we rigorously police our waking thoughts, why there is what happens in sleep, with all those neurons firing.

And the heart breaks and the heart breaks but tears in sleep are not real tears. And weeping is for sainted statues (on a monument smiling at grief).

Pictures, pictures, scenes, disparate, disconnected (my dreams are never linear and they don't make sense) swirling like the colours of a rainbow.

I dreamt KL was drowning. Someone called me, an analyst and he said, do I have a story for you. He said, KL is under (I don't remember how many) feet of water. And I said, really? What happened to our beloved drainage and irrigation department? Wherefore the Smart Tunnel? And he didn't answer. He rung off after telling me that all the major cities were under water. Including the one I happened to be in that time.

The rain pelted down. It was pelting down in the waking world too. Maybe that's why. But it rained and rained throughout my dream where strange and wonderful and not so wonderful things were happening.

I was stranded in a weird place, stuck in a room with someone I loved and someone I hated.

I woke up with my sick father shaking me. "Did Julie arrive?"

Sleep fogged, I answered: "I think so. Mum said she did when I spoke to her."

And he nodded OK. I sank down again. (Fighting the flu, at the moment odds are even) He woke me up again. "Do you want chappati?"

No. What I really want is to scrub my heart and my mind clean of images that obstruct and make my heart shrink in sheer misery. It's not fair that this is happening now when I thought I was over it.

Jeez. How long does it take to get over someone?

Now I have the impetus to finish this project that is weighing me down like an Eiffel Tower around my neck.

I'll finish it and go on a road trip.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Alcohol doesn't help. And old haunts are haunted.

And if I run far enough and fast enough maybe I'll be too exhausted to dream.

The ten thousand things arise together
and I watch their return.
They return each to its root.
Returning to one's roots is known as stillness.
Returning to one's destiny is known as the constant.
Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.
To ignore the constant
is to go wrong, and end in disorder.

-Lao Tzu, Book 1, Chapter 16-