But oh, my love, don’t forget me as I let the water take me.
||Florence & the Machine, "What the Water Gave Me"||
Oh yeah, life is bare, gloom and misery everywhere. Stormy weather, stormy weather, and I just can't get my poor self together. Oh, I'm weary all of the time, so weary all of the time.
||Etta James, "Stormy Weather"||
The
dream always starts the same. Somewhere in the dark of my sleep I become aware
of a slow pulse of red light. At first, it’s dim, as if coming from a distance
and through thick air. Something about the scene always terrifies me—although I’ve
had the dream multiple times and now know what’s coming, even the first go
around I could feel something wasn’t right. That I should run. But my feet are
cemented and I stand a prisoner in the dark as the red light throbs closer and
brighter. Eventually I can tell the light is coming from Christmas lights, the
kind I used to have wrapped around my headboard. They gave my room a rosy glow.
But these lights are different. Harsher. What they illuminate is tragedy at its worst. Eventually the details start to surface—the outline of the window panes,
dark shadows of posters on walls, vague shapes of furniture. And then finally,
the girl. Doll like, almost, she hangs from a pipe, limbs drained of life. I try to block
the sight but my arms won’t move. I can make out the curve of her hair, the
angle of her arm. And then just before I can see the grotesque sorrow written on her face
. . . I wake up.
I haven’t
had the dream for a couple of months. The last time I had it, I was stressed
out and sleep deprived during Practice Court. Before that, it surfaced a couple
of times during the Summer of Celibacy. It happened most often at the tail end
of my 2L year. It robbed me of sleep’s pleasure. And unlike most other dreams,
I couldn’t comfort myself with a quick, “It was just a dream,” upon waking.
Because it wasn’t just a dream. This nightmare happened—it serves as a real
life example of the dark depths of sorrow and tragedy that will follow me the rest
of my life.
The fact
that this dream has resurfaced is symptomatic of the week I’ve been having.
When it rains, it pours, so it figures that the thing I find most terrifying in
my dreams has surfaced to keep me from the few hours of peace I afford myself a
day. On top
of that I have to worry about finding out if I pass the bar (which creeps closer daily), finding a job, figuring
out how to pay back my loans, how to make my car (which is falling apart) last,
whether my ICD 9 codes are correct, why the hell my phone is strangely silent
when it shouldn’t be, where I stand romantically, how to deal with most of my
peers that I’m closest to being hundreds of miles away, worrying about Nurse’s
mom who was in the hospital, worrying about my aunt (also my godmother) that
was also in the hospital, and why the massive cocktail of drugs that I am on
isn’t doing a thing to rid pressure, chills, and aches that are riddling my
body. It’s just been one of those weeks.
But
complaining wasn’t the point of this post, so excuse the digression. The reason
this dream haunts me today, why that event will probably haunt a lot of people
for a long time, is because there was no closure. And closure is key.
I’ve
been thinking a lot about closure lately, and the role it plays in our lives.
Closure in tragedies, closure in relationships, closure in books, novels, movies. One thing seems certain—most
everyone craves it. Who hasn’t seen a story on Dateline ID where Lester Holt
interviews a parent whose child has disappeared and the parent says, “I just
wanted to know what happened to them, good or bad, though we were hoping for
good.” Or in a tragedy such as a suicide, everyone wants to know why. Why did
they do it? Could it have been stopped? Or in a relationship, where you obsess
about what went wrong. Why did he stop talking to me for two years? And that’s
when I realized what closure is—it is the absence of those nagging questions
or of the drive to ask questions in the first place.
I have a
friend—we’ll call him Professor X—and we have a very complicated past. We had a
thing going on most of my senior year in college. It wasn’t healthy in the least
bit. He wouldn’t commit which pissed me off and caused me to do stupid things. We were continually bickering. I was headstrong and so
was he. It was a continual tug of war—who exerted the most influence over
whom? Usually, I’ll admit, he won. And while a majority of the time I
entertained notions of him in extreme pain, and although no one caused nearly
as many of my tears that year as he did, he was a good kid, somewhere deep inside of the
mess he’d become. It seems I have a knack for that—for picking diamonds in the
rough. Only, I get them when they’re rough and other girls get them when they
are emerald cuts.
Well,
this guy, he grew into what I always knew he could be. He changed right before
my eyes over the last couple of years. And what triggered that change was a
girl. I always knew he had it in him—I just wasn’t the one to bring it out of him
and neither was the parade of skanks that followed. Around this girl, he was
different.
Professor
X and his girlfriend broke up a few weeks ago. Since then, we’ve been talking
constantly. We talk about his relationship, what went wrong, what he would do
differently, what she could possibly be thinking. And trust me—I get the irony
of the whole situation—I am counseling a boy through his grief that caused me a
ton of it just a few years ago. But that’s the way life is—you never really see
these things coming and it’s always the oddest shoulders you have to cry on
when it matters.
I know
that he’s having problems letting go. And I get why—he doesn’t have the closure
he wants. He has questions he doesn’t have answers to. He has things he needs
to say that he never got to say. He doesn’t know what she’s feeling or why she’s
feeling that way. He is lost in the storm of his first true love and he doesn’t
have the closure he needs to find his way out of it. And he doesn’t know when
it will come.
Now that
it seems I’m likely to join him shortly on the HMS Misery, we were talking
tonight—him being the counselor and addict all in one--and I posed a question
that I realized summed up our situations, and possibly every other situation,
in a sentence.
When do
you know when to say “Uncle” and give up?
Lacking
closure can do funny things. It can keep you hanging on to the ghost of a
person or a relationship. In my first brush with real, mutual feelings between
myself and a boy, I freaked out and stopped talking to the kid—stopped taking
his calls, ran off with another guy. It all was too close for comfort. When we
briefly reunited in college, in a booze fueled talk, he mentioned that I had
haunted him all those years—because he didn’t know what had caused me to leave
or what he had done to make me stop talking to him. I thought it was weird at
the time because I had never had that bad of a lack of closure—closure mostly
denotes you care about something and at that point, although I’m not proud to
admit it now, I really didn’t care much for the guys I was associating with.
But then . . . karma.
AEG and
his two years of utter silence came around. And I wondered about it. It ate me
up inside—what did I do to deserve this? Where was he? Didn’t he miss me like I
missed him? And I would swear to myself that I wouldn’t be whole until I had
the answers to these questions. And in those two years, I’d find myself at
drinks with a cute boy and AEG and those unanswered questions would creep quietly
back in to my head. AEG haunted me.
Lack of
closure can drive family members to look for the missing until they’re found.
It can drive investigators to solve a crime. It can cause some of the greatest romantic
novels to be written and the greatest movies to be made. It can cause some of
the greatest songs to be created.
Closure,
when it comes, is a chameleon. It’s different with everyone. It’ll hit you at
the oddest times. With AEG, it wasn’t even speaking to him again—it was just
the point where I didn’t care to keep asking the questions. For some, it’s when
those questions are answered or when something new in their lives answers the
questions for them. I sometimes wonder about Professor X and how his closure
will come—how it will all work out in the end. The possibilities make my head
hurt. I don’t know how it’s going to happen or when, but I know that he needs
it—it’s the life raft out of this bad place his head is in.
As I
said, if we have to be on the HMS Misery and it’s going down, at least we’re on
it together.
Round here we always stand up straight; round here,
something radiates.
||Counting Crows, "Round Here"||
If I may
be allowed a slight digression (and I am, this is my blog), I laughed bitterly
today when talking to Professor X about our respective situations. After weeks
of both of us giving advice on perseverance, fortitude, praying, staying
away from destructive impulses—I just had to laugh. Five years ago, if you would
have seen us on a Friday night, we’d be a far cry from the rational,
(semi)mature adults whining on the phone we are now. We were the lives of the party. We
were likely challenging each other across a beer pong table, two conquerors
facing off, Cleopatra and Caesar. I would have a smirk on because I knew that I
was going to win the battle that night, and he was cockily self-assured because
he knew he’d win the war. We’d flirt outrageously with others in the room but
especially each other. And there was no mention of love, or settling down, or
compassion for others. Compassion was a sign of weakness.
We were
young. We were stupid. We had wild oats to sow. But still—the difference in the
picture is striking. Like I said, it’s surprising the shoulders you find
yourself crying on in life. It’s surprising where the most compassion comes
from.
Closure,
or lack of it—it’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it?
I leave
you with Adele lyrics, because mostly, someone’s said it better, captured it
better, than I ever could.
"Melt My Heart to Stone"
Right under my feet there's air made of bricks
Pulls me down turns me weak for you
I find myself repeating like a broken tune
And I'm forever excusing your intentions
And I give in to my pretendings
Which forgive you each time
Without me knowing
They melt my heart to stone
And I hear your words that I made up
You say my name like there could be an us
I best tidy up my head I'm the only one in love
I'm the only one in love
Each and every time I turn around to leave
I feel my heart begin to burst and bleed
So desperately I try to link it with my head
But instead I fall back to my knees
As you tear your way right through me
I forgive you once again
Without me knowing
You've burnt my heart to stone
And I hear your words that I made up
You say my name like there could be an us
I best tidy up my head I'm the only one in love
I'm the only one in love
Why do you steal my hand
Whenever I'm standing my own ground
You build me up, then leave me dead
Well I hear your words you made up
I say your name like there should be an us
I best tidy up my head I'm the only one in love
I'm the only one in love
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