This morning I woke up from a dream feeling sad. A lot of the details escape me (duh, it was a dream), but the feeling lingered and left me a little slow and dazed. In the dream, I was friends with, and maybe dating, a very pretty and elegant woman (who might have looked like a combination of other women I know). She was also becoming friends with an ex of mine (the woman I dated in high school). I had introduced the two of them. Together they were attending a formal event that I wasn’t invited to. I can remember something about ball gowns, one was red the other white. In their heels, they were both taller than me. They were becoming close friends and in addition to making plans for the formal event, they were making plans to room together the following year. And that seemed to be the source of the glum feelings. A friendship I helped foster was leaving me by the wayside. I was left out and feeling short (literally) and petty and dejected. I was on the verge of losing the girl and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
For a solid day and a half, I’ve had this strange feeling in my gut – it’s a little like nervousness or stage fright anxiety, and a little like longing. At times it’s that click click click anticipation of the roller coaster nearing the top of the big drop. It feels like I’m about to lose something or I miss something or I’m about to be forced wildly out of my comfort zone. I don’t know how else to describe the sensation other than to say it leaves me feeling deflated. I become pretty useless when I feel this way. I can’t focus enough to read or do much of anything productive. Instead, I’ll spend my time trying to figure out where this feeling came from, what the triggers might have been, how far its horizons might stretch, and what I might do to snap out of it.
I don’t think spending part of the day yesterday going through old stuff helped with the malaise (I know it didn’t)… but there were other things too. Which is to say, it’s been building. Earlier in the week, inspired by Beck’s remake of “Old Man,” I made a playlist of semi-melancholic songs (“Bridges Burning” by Wild Child, “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” by Elvis Costello, “Patience” by Morphine, “Not the Same” by Ben Folds, etc.). Yesterday on the walk with the dog, we passed by a black and white tuxedo cat sitting like a wise monk on a swivel chair that had been left at the curb for the garbage. The cat reminded of my cat Nick, the zen cat. The other night I responded to a woman who had liked me on a dating app. I pretty much never do this, but she’s into music and poetry… She wrote back saying yay – I was the one she was hoping to hear from. She sent along a poem she liked (I was familiar with it) and she wanted to know if I was out where she was or not (my profile says I don’t live there) – she wants to meet. I said I was not. I haven’t heard from her since. Last night, I was going over to a guy’s house to play pool with a few guys I haven’t met before, and I was probably feeling anxious about that (new people, new place, and I’m not very good at pool). There’s also the change of seasons and weather and shorter days… and then there was the basement and my stuff.
Any one of those things could have been a minor trigger – or perhaps it’s all those things combined. I’ve been contemplating (in another post not yet finished) my ability to draw people into my circle which has the odd effect of making me feel lonely. The more people I meet, and the more they seem to enjoy my company, the more I feel cursed by that damn Joni Mitchell quote about meeting lots of people is just a way of falling in love with yourself over and over again….
In this mood, I begin to miss the possible lives I’m not living, the world I’m not seeing or observing. I begin to see and feel the beauty and sadness in everything. I’ll read a sentence about an evangelist on the radio and I begin to imagine and miss (even though I’ve never experienced this) a warm sunny day in the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles where an immigrant farm hand drives by in an old Cadillac listening to the static-filled radio station and the sky is clear and the intersections are wide and mostly abandoned. Or I’ll see a picture of a blue chair and I’ll imagine an older man who sits by the water’s edge thinking of years gone by and his failing eyesight and the friend sick with cancer.
I don’t know what to do with any of this. I try not to run from it or even hide from it, but I also want to make sure I’m only spending an appropriate amount of time in it – because too much time in this space is a treading water type of exhaustion. But that’s also the part I’m not sure I have much control over. I have no say in where my dreams run wild or the husks of emotions they leave behind. I have no say in the waves of minor griefs or images that might lap at my unsuspecting shore… and quite often, I’m inclined to watch the tide and listen for the sound of a distant gull.