Tuesday, September 05, 2006
In The Dark, Indeed
Insomniac.
Earlier, my eyes were so heavy, my thoughts and movements so slowed, I thought perhaps I could sleep through the night. I nestled in, comfortable, tired, drifted off easily, vanished into the world of dreams I have yet to be able to articulate with the written word. It's an amazing world, and I do hope to share it eventually. Colorful. Scary sometimes. Funny. Manic. I can do what my body and mind, at their best wakenings, cannot. This night, like many others though, I don't get to stay.
I'm thirsty. I gotta pee. I forgot to brush my teeth earlier. Then, the strangest urge comes over me. I want to dance. I mean, I don't dance. I have a thick body, short legs, and was never gifted with the coordination and creativity to be a dancer. I learned to square dance and waltz as a kid, tango a little as an adult. I could dance fairly well when I drank by using the grace and coordination of karate movements, sanitized and disguised by making them flow more like kung-fu and what I'd seen Polynesian dancers do on TV with their hands. It worked ok with a lot of Chivas Regal in me. I got compliments from strangers.
Since nearly a third of my hard drive is taken up with music, finding appropriate sounds is easy. I create a playlist on my Winamp. Nobody in the neighborhood is awake, the blinds are closed. The cat already thinks I'm nuts, and doesn't care as long as she's fed daily. I dance! Moving amid the detritus and pending pieces of my home reconstruction, the disorganized mess of my living room furniture, I turn, dip, whirl, step, near-kick, and oddly enough, don't bump anything, knock anything over. I think briefly that it's a shame I'm alone. I'd like to be dancing with somebody. In time, I say, and I'm back in the sound, sometimes eyes closed. Anyone watching would probably think of a two legged rhino on drugs, but no one sees, and I feel graceful enough.
After 3 songs, I'm through with dancing for now. I grab the arms of a chair, do a few pushups, do some calf raises, call up pieces of long-unpracticed kata, sometimes operating strictly on muscle memory, but things come back, and I'm breathing a bit hard and feeling good.
I had been nostalgic earlier, going over bits and pieces of my life, and some of those thoughts return for a while. I remember people complimenting on my strength as I delivered my younger brother's eulogy many years ago. They didn't see the times I broke down, sank into a shifting desert of despair and loss, sobbing so hard I pulled muscles in my back, unable to think or talk. That's done now. I miss him. That will never be done.
I remember a night when my young wife, sandwiched between the demands of her family and my needs, eyes wet with nearly shed tears, said, "You don't like my family, do you?", and her pain was like a weight on my chest.
"No," I told her, "I don't like them. But I do love them." The look in her eyes and the one returned held so much more than the words we said, and suddenly, in our car parked by a river on a blue Florida night, our arms were around each other, our faces nestled in that warm safe place against each other's neck and shoulder, and we held each other like letting go would collapse the ground under us.
I remembered the pained feeling the first time my parents called me to drive 13 miles to their house to change a lightbulb. I didn't mind it, of course, but that was the first strong sign of their mortality, the tiny beginning of them drifting toward an ending, and a loss of much that was good in the world.
I flashed through all the fine dogs I've had in my life, and how much they meant to me. Dogs have always been among my best friends, and my ability to keep secrets often rested on their shoulders, since I always told them what I was sworn to never speak to any human.
I decide to blog all this, which I'm doing, and I find some sweet, happy songs to elevate my mood. I'm playing them now. My eyes are getting tired again, and the energy burst from earlier seems to have abated. Maybe I can sleep again.
I hope you already are.
