You're The Heat That I know, Listen, You Are My Sun

Flying Too Close To the Sun

Entry 2 12:27 PM

Last night's therapy was insane. I won't go over the details here, with one exception. I have written it all before.  However, Jenny did insist she isn't having an affair. She defines that to mean she can't spend the night or fuck him, to be clear.  But she never says that.

The Fall of Icarus by
Peter Paul Reubens

Today is an unusually busy day.  As I finished a meeting just before 12, I could hear Jenny on the phone, apparently talking to her sister, Moni. She said, I am probably talking too loudly, which peaked my curiosity, so I walked to the bottom of the basement stairs where I am working, to hear more clearly, because I have become a creeper for information, given lies are the currency of the realm. She, Jenny, was telling Moni that last night Eric the pinché motherfucker's wife told him she wanted a divorce.  So this tells me two things.  One, she is a lying liar, not a newsflash.  Two, that her sisters are lying liars.  I so want to know what the narrative is she is sharing with them.  Also note, the secrecy was intentional, which further underscores her fully knowing she is a lying liar that lies, and also that her sister is complicit in all of this.  I just wish we could drop the game.

Eagle's Flight

Entry 1 11:44 AM

Yesterday on Beacon Hill a group of us, including Jenny and Abby, were standing under telephone lines teaming with crows.  Suddenly, directly overhead a bald eagle flew over with a baby crow clutched in its yellow talons.  The adult crows, en masse, left the telephone lines as one body and  chased the eagle, cawing at him in rage, trying to stop him.  Their call was deafening.  The eagle, facing this protest and assault, let go of the baby bird. Both the eagle and the baby bird flew away in opposite directions.  The crows returned to the telephone line, their cacophony continuing.  Less than a minute later, the eagle swooped down from on high, grabbed an adult crow, again, right above us, and was gone in an instant, before the crows could chase him.  

I dreamt of this over and again last night, and this morning woke up realizing that incident is a metaphor for what Jenny, what we her family, are facing.  The cancer is stable, thanks to the chemotherapy.  But it will, and we will be caught unawares, swoop down and snatch her from us. This cancer is a merciless predator. I know its true.  I do. I have a pit in my stomach.  Everyday.  I don't want her to leave, forever. I can't make her stay.  If I had known some years ago she would have been diagnosed with a terminal illness, would I have made different choices?  If she had known, would she have?

There are ghosts all around us.    In my travels after Corey died in 1984, the places we went were hard to visit.  Once, I was sure I saw him walking at the Pike Place Market, a place we got drunk at on an 11th grade field trip, and chased after him. I had wanted him to be there.  But it was a memory, it was willed by me, seeing him.  He was never there.  Dying at 18, these many years later, it really does seem he was never there.  But when I speak of ghosts, I do not mean those that fled their material form.  I am speaking of memories, of experience.

Having lived so long here, I see ghosts everywhere. Things I did here or there as I grew up and grow old.  I have lost so many, seen so much change.  I just want to run away from this, to go somewhere where there is no there there.