Thursday, October 31, 2013

THE HOLES THEY LEAVE



That night the stars kept me awake. I couldn’t sleep, so I went to the window overlooking the ocean. A green light flashed at the horizon beyond the cloaked meadow. Looking up, I saw more stars than I ever remember, brilliant and shimmering. Elated, I felt my whole being inhaling the ebony sky teeming with star life. I stood in awe for moments, minutes, or hours—how long, I can’t say.
    When I returned to my bed, I still couldn’t sleep—but not because of the mad convergence of memories, desires and fears that had been crowding in on me before. My mind was free and pure with the light of those gems in the dark velvet sky. I wasn’t drawn back to look again, however compelling; rather, I just let them live and expand in me—as they always were and always will be, as I lay in quiet wakefulness.
    But not long enough. As the first light dawned, edging in on me was an awareness of my own smallness against the expanse of the grandeur I had witnessed. I wished to remain in that blessed state, like one holding on to a fading dream, but those habitual, chaotic thoughts began pressing in once more: the absurdity of being human, the perpetual dirge sounding beneath the surface of mundane reality. I felt an impending void. I wanted to fill it with the beauty and mystery of the starry heavens. Out there, in here, “as above, so below,” these words were like pearls on the strand of my desire to remain as I had been, but it was not to be.
    That was the night the stars kept me awake.

    Since then, I haven’t been the same. Why? I don’t know, but I am determined to return to that state of grace. During the day, I go about my routine and practical matters, but with anticipation of the other half of my life—the night. It’s all obsession. I sleep for an hour or two then awaken and wander to the window to see if the stars are as they had been that night. They never are.
    I know it’s crazy, but there has to be a way back. I began trying anything that might diminish my agitated condition. I’ve attempted to clear my mind through meditation, but to no avail. I bought a bunch of self-help books, joined a Yoga class, devour natural remedies for sleeplessness, anxiety and depression. I also started seeing a therapist, which I had meant to do when I came back from my travels a couple of years ago.
    I am also reading poetry about the stars hoping to affirm my experience of that night. I’ve found many star-inspired expressions, but the lines in this poem come closest to my obsession to recreate it:

    And now, each night I count the stars,
    And each night I get the same number.
    And when they will not come to be counted,
    I count the holes they leave.

    Desperate to find peace, and as a last-ditch effort, I asked my therapist to prescribe something to help me sleep. About a week into taking the meds, this happened: While asleep, I got up, went outside, walked into my next door neighbor’s house, opened the refrigerator, took out a bowl of pasta and ate it. I also took her dog out for a walk, then wandered back to my place.
    My neighbor, Dana, witnessed the whole scene, and came over the next morning to tell me about my strange adventure. I didn’t believe her—that is not until she showed me the evidence. She started taking a video when she heard me come in, watched me in amazement and followed me around, ready to call 911 in case things got even crazier. I was embarrassed, and it was frightening to hear. I felt like an idiot. So much for sleeping pills!
    Dana and I went for a walk on the beach that afternoon. It was sunny and warm for late October, the sea all lapis lazuli and silver wrinkles under a clear sky. We talked as we walked into our elongated shadows. Until then, I hadn’t thought I knew her very well, but I realized then that I probably felt closer to her than to anyone. Even though, ashamed of the incident the night before, I felt safe with her, maybe because she had said more than once that I remind her of her daughter Linney, who had recently come home after years away.
   I told her about the night the stars kept me awake, and my unshakable obsession. I even told her about the poetry I’d found that could sometimes calm me. I started to feel like Dana could see through to the real me. (I am not sure there is a real me.) I didn’t resent it though; at least that would mean someone knew me. The thing is, I’d never confided in anyone before in that way (not even my therapist, not really). And Dana didn’t think I was insane.

    How can I say what it’s like—my quest? Waiting for the new moon and cloudless sky, going down to the ocean’s edge to stargaze in the “mystical moist night air” (another line from a poem). Even though the heavens are always majestic, there’s never anything to catch me off guard—like on that night.
    That’s it!
    Why am I always on guard? I ask myself. I have no answer. Poetry is the only thing that can catch me off guard—with ideas and feelings I’ve never had before, but I somehow recognize them as mine when I “hear” them—the beauty and truth of them. I find myself more at ease at those times, and a little less desperate.
    My therapist tells me I do have the answer, and she will help me find it. Part of me thinks it’s all bullshit: my quest, my question, her reassurance, my obsession, my strategies and remedies. What would it mean to come to terms with an answer (if there is one)? Still, I continue the therapy and all the rest of it (except the sleeping pills). Why? Because I want to get back to perfection—the ultimate distraction from myself—that feeling of the stars living in me.
    A couple of weeks after Dana and I walked together, she called to say we should meet for dinner. Her invitation made me feel good—comforting to think of being with her again. She said she had a gift for me, and I got the impression she also wanted to tell me something. I figure she has worried about me ever since the sleep-walking incident. I look forward to our meeting when I will confide in her even more—tell her things and ask her things.
    She’s a wise person, an “old soul,” as they say. I respect and trust her. I will even let my guard down, intentionally this time and really spill my guts (poor Dana). Maybe I will hear myself say something that will surprise me, like poetry can, something that comes from the part of me that isn’t on guard.
    Driving back from a therapy session I decide I should just quit going. The therapist is bringing up stuff I don’t want to think about, which I guess would be good, if I really want to get to the bottom of things? But it doesn’t feel good, and besides, I already am at the bottom of … something, but also feel at a threshold.
    As I pass Dana’s house, I see a woman on the sidewalk with Dana's dog. It’s a damp, raw November evening. Something is wrong. She’s in a nightgown, pacing back and forth, looking like she’s in a daze. It’s got to be Dana’s daughter. I pull up next to her and roll down the window.
    "Are you okay? You're Dana's daughter, Linney, right?” She’s crying, so I can barely make out what she’s saying. She doesn’t answer my question.
    She just keeps repeating, "Mom, why? What am I gonna to do? Why, why did you do this to me?"
    She doesn’t even seem to notice me, so. I get out of the car and practically pick her up to get her into the back seat. The dog jumps in too. I tell her I’m her next door neighbor, and a friend of her mother’s, which makes her cry even more. I bring her back to my place, clear a spot on the sofa and pour us both a shot of whisky. Between her sobs, I hear what’s happened.
    “My mother’s dead,” her voiced strained.”I didn’t know …. She … she … ”
    “What? No …” I interrupt, “No, that can’t be true; we were supposed to … ”
    “Yes, yes it is true. She was sick, but she didn't even tell me. Do you believe that? I called to her last night, and when … when she didn’t answer, I went into her room. I kept shaking her, but she didn’t wake up. She looked funny, so I called an ambulance. I stayed with her until … until the end. It was horrible, and I … I … ”
    She begins crying again. I don’t want to pressure her, so I just let her go on and get everything out. When the sobs subside, she tells me that Dana regained consciousness for a bit at the hospital, but the doctors told Linney that her mother was in the end stage of Leukemia. She would not be coming home. There was just time enough to say goodbyes. That’s when Dana told Linney about the things she had left for her. You’d think it would’ve been something for Linney to hold on to. Maybe that's harder—holding on when she is never coming back.
    “I’m not gonna to do it. I don't wanna see anything—whatever she left. I … I can’t … I won’t. Anyway, she …she hated me and … ”
    I stop her right there, trying to set her straight, “Now, that is not true. Your mother did not hate you; she talked about you a lot. She wanted the best for you; she loved you.” I didn’t really know about their relationship, but I did know Dana worried about her.
    “No, no she didn’t,” Linney practically screams at me, with a blank look, then puts her hands over her face, her body shaking in silent gasps. While I wait for her to calm, I notice that she is not much younger than me, and is quite a beauty. So Dana’s saying I reminded her of Linney had nothing to do with our looking alike. She is a lot smaller and thinner than me (I try to ignore the sharp twinge of that fact). She has the kind of looks, no doubt, that turn a lot of heads, open a lot of doors, and maybe keep her from seeing herself as she really is.
    I remember Dana told me that when Linney once said, “I’m starving,” she knew it was literally true. So, she somehow persuaded her to go to lunch. Linney ordered crudités (which sounds much better than “raw vegetables”). Dana said they would have tasted better, too, with the crab and cheddar dip. Apparently, Linney was frantic to move the vegetables away from the dip, “as if they were going to jump into it by themselves. The dip should have come with a ten-foot pole,” was what Dana had said. She could be funny like that, but it was sad too, partly because I can relate to that fear big time.
    I knew Linney was like me, too, in that she had been away for a few years “traveling” (a kinder way of saying, “wandering”). She came home to stay, Dana said, “until she sorted things out and got her life back on track.” I’m also waiting for that to happen for me.
    After a few minutes of silence, I hear myself say, “You can stay here tonight, so you are not alone,” but hope she doesn’t take me up on it (until she doesn’t). That’s when I feel a dark and heavy weight looming, about to crash down. For some reason, she wants to sleep in her mother’s bed, so I walk back with her and get her settled in with the dog.
    The next morning I check in on her. She cries off and on, but doesn’t say anything else about Dana's sudden "disappearance," avoids eye-contact, and keeps repeating, "I don't want to live in this house. I've gotta get away from here. I can't stay. I’m not going through those things she left. I'm just not! I’ll go away. I don’t want to see anything or look at anything.”
    Okay, okay already, what a big baby, I am thinking. I only say, “Your mother must have had her reasons—leaving certain things for you, don’t you think? Aren’t you even curious? She seemed like a wise person,” I innocently offered, but Linney looked stunned.
    "My mother, wise? No, she was a crazy person. You didn't know her—not like I did. She did hurtful things, like not telling me she was dying.”
    "That's what I mean, she had her reasons,” trying in vain to convince her. “Yes, I guess I didn't know her…not the way you did, but it seemed like she looked out for you.” I was realizing Dana knew a lot more than she let on about a lot of things. Linney didn’t know Dana the way I did either, or that she had looked out for me too.
    I feel sad when I remember that we were supposed to meet in a couple of days. I had planned to learn more about her then, but was most looking forward to learning more about myself (everything really).
    “What are you talking about?” Linney whines. “She was not looking out for me. We never got along, and especially since I came back home!”
    “She never mentioned anything about that to me. I heard only good things, maybe a little concern, but …. ” No, I decide I am finished. I don’t want to hear it—Linney’s distorted take on things, or think any more about it. I’m not going to convince her. I resent her for being closed off, and for making me feel so protective of Dana and her memory.
    I’m blindsided when she begs me to go with her to make funeral arrangements. I want to say, “Oh, no, now you are the crazy one, not your mother. I couldn’t possibly.“ Instead I hear myself say, “Okay, if you want me to.” I mean, she has no one else.
    Somehow, Linney and I manage to get through the funeral arrangements. I am surprised by my own feelings of loss, a sense of the finality of death, and the certainty of my own demise one day, which is not something I had thought too much about before. By the time I get home, I’m exhausted and hungry. I can’t eat or sleep though, and stay up until midnight.
    I flop on the bed and try to relax, using my techniques: visualizations, exercises, and all the other things that never work. I end up staring at the ceiling until 3:00 am. Finally, I pick up one of the poetry books scattered at the bottom of my bed. When I feel myself begin to unwind a bit, I “hear” these lines from the last poem I read, like a mantra chanting itself in the dark:

    That’s how you came here, like a star
    without a name. Move across the night sky
    with those anonymous lights.

    I close my eyes, imagining I am one of those lights—a star moving through the heavens. Instead of the stars living in me, I will live in them. It’s the closest I’ve come to that feeling on the night the stars kept me awake— unguarded—outside the fortress walls.
    The memorial service and burial are held on the day Dana and I were supposed to meet, the day I was going to find out everything I always wanted to know, but was afraid to ask. The strange thing is, I slept that night for eight solid hours—the first time in months. I never believed in magic or miracles; now I’m not so sure. Maybe Dana is able to hear all that I was going to ask her, and all that I was going tell her. Maybe my desperation somehow can reach her (wherever she is), and she has pity on me—once again.
    For a while I see Linney once or twice a week walking the dog. We wave to each other without a word, but I haven’t seen her for a month now. I’ve called her at least once a week, offering to help with anything she may need.
    "Thanks," she always says, "I'm fine. I don't need anything.”
    “Okay, then. Well, you let me know if you do?” but no word from her—until tonight.
    Out of the blue, she calls, as I came in the door. She sounds frantic. “You have to come over … right now!”
    “Okay, be right over,” and I break out into a cold sweat at the prospect of what I will find, what I will see or hear. The sun is going down. It’s dark and icy cold. The ocean is roaring, maybe churning up for a Nor’easter. I walk over to Dana’s house and go in through the kitchen door—the one I wandered into the night of the sleeping pill fiasco.

    Dana’s house always looked staged for a photo shoot. On her tables and shelves, here and there, she would place bluebells in the spring, seashells and feathers in the summer, autumn leaves in the fall, moss and crystals in winter. I liked the displays of seasonal warmth, light and color, but now it looks more like my place, not at all inviting—no frills, dark, and kind of messy. I notice flower arrangements left from the funeral on the countertop and kitchen table, wilted and dried.
    “In here,” Linney calls from the small office off of the kitchen, lamplight spilling over the doorway. The room is as if Dana has just walked out of it, and will be "back in a sec,” as she would say. It is now, I guess, the single welcoming, orderly, and bright spot in the house.
    Looking up, Linney says, “I made myself come in here early this morning." I assume she has been in here all day.
    “Oh, how? I mean … you said you never wanted to … ” She cuts me off, running her hand through her long hair in a nervous gesture. “I know … I know. I never wanted to come in here, but … I … had this dream last night. My mom was calling me, but I couldn’t find her. I wandered through the rooms, but it was kinda like I was outside too, trying to get in. You know how dreams are weird like that? The wind kept pushing me back. I could see inside the house. Waves were crashing against the windows from the inside, and I heard the wind howling … sounded like a train coming. It woke me up. It was still dark, but I could see the light coming from the lamp in the office. It hasn’t been on since my mom died, so I felt like she made it come on … like her way of calling me in here. I feel like I’m still in a dream now, or,” Linney hesitates, “or awake for the first time—not sure which.”
    Me too. I brace myself when she says that, but I can’t say a word. I notice she looks different tonight, still sad, but softer, more composed, and somehow, yes, more “awake." The glow in the room illuminates her long hair, and the gold trim at the collar and cuffs of her nightshirt. I keep my gaze on her and try to focus as she begins to show me some of the things Dana left for her. She opens a picture album.
    ”These are pictures of us, of me, when I was a little, when Dad was still alive." She points to a photo of her in a pine tree, taken from the ground up. The branches look like a feathery green staircase with Linney looking down, waving. There is another of Dana holding a little Linney up with one hand under a white beach umbrella dotted with blue fish.
    "I didn't know …. I didn't know so many things,” she whispers, as if I am not even here. She picks up a worn, white journal, and holds it close to her. “I didn’t know Mom wrote in this when I was growing up.”
    "Maybe you didn't need to know … until now.”
    Pictures and papers are strewn over the desk, and in its open drawers. She picks up a page, “I’ve been reading this letter over and over." She doesn’t read it out loud to me, but I sense it must have broken a silence, opened a door or shattered some walls. Maybe filled a void?
    Linney opens another small book with a black leather cover embossed with tiny white stars. She turns the pages, pausing to read some of Dana’s entries, her fingers tracing along the lines. On the first page is the date of Dana’s diagnosis, a description of her treatment plan, and her intention to keep her illness from Linney, apparently also her thoughts and feelings through it all. Linney reads lines from poems on virtues that meant something to Dana:
    On hope as, “a thing with feathers/that perches on the soul,” and on faith, like the moon, “faithful, even as it fades from fullness/slowly becoming that last curving and impossible/sliver of light before the final darkness.” There is mention of Dana’s “year of miracles,” of gratitude and joy through her last days spent with her daughter at home, but also of her companion, “constant sorrow.”
    I am feeling like Dana left these treasures for me too when Linney asks me to read the last entries. I am lightheaded and disoriented as I read what Dana wrote in her graceful handwriting, my voice barely audible, far away sounding, like it is not me speaking:

    Pain — has an Element of Blank—
    It cannot recollect
    When it begun—or if there were
    A time when it was not—
    
And

The Heart asks Pleasure–first–
And then–Excuse from Pain–
And then–those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering–
And then–to go to sleep–
And then–if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The liberty to die–

    I look up at Linney holding out to me a small package wrapped in dark blue tissue, bound with silver ribbon.
    "She left this for you. Open it, I want to see.”    
    “Really?” I take it into my trembling hands and unwrap it. It is a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson with a note:

    For Stella
    With Hope and Faith
    From Dana

    Outside the night is still and silent, no stars, and sea fog drifting in.

Acknowledgements

Title “The Holes They Leave” and “Each night I count the stars/…” from “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide” in S O S: POEMS 1961-2013, copyright ©2014 by The Estate of Amiri Baraka. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

“as above, so below” from the Hermetic texts of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus.

“mystical moist night air” from“When I Heard the Learned Astronomer” by Walt Whitman.

“That’s how you came here/like a star…” from “A Star Without a Name”by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Mathnawi III, 1284-1288) Translation by Coleman Barks in Say I Am You, (copyright ©Maypop, 1994), printed with express permission of Coleman Barks.

“a thing with feathers…” from “Hope” by Emily Dickinson in Poems by Emily Dickinson, First & Second Series, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson.

___“faithful, even as it fades from fullness/…” from “Faith” by David Whyte in River Flow: New & Selected Poems, printed with permission from Many Rivers Press www.davidwhyte.com, ©Many Rivers Press, Langley, WA 98260 60 USA.

___“constant sorrow” from“Man of “Constant Sorrow” by Dick Burnett (1913) originally published as “Farewell Song.”

___“Pain has an element of blank…” and “The heart asks pleasure first…” from “The Mystery of Pain”and “The heart asks pleasure first” by Emily Dickinson in Poems by Emily Dickinson, First & Second Series, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson