Life in LA

These dreams...

Last night I dreamt that I was standing on a balcony with Christopher P. He was a boy that I was in love with during the time of my mother's death. We were friends but I was absolutely in love with him. He knew this but didn't feel the same way and we remained friends despite. It was always difficult for me. It was hard to be around him, to look at his face and his hair and his arms, to talk about the things we talked about, to do the things we did. Underneath whatever it was that I presented to him, all I could think about was how much I wanted to be with him, how much I wanted him to love me the way I loved him.

It's a longer story than I'll write here but the details that are important are that I was with him the night my mother died. I was on my way from Vermont to D.C., where she was in the hospital, and I stopped in New Jersey to see him and I stayed the night. She died while I was sleeping there, in his uncle's house in New Jersey.

Another detail you need to know about the story of Christopher and me is that months after my mother's death I visited him in San Francisco on two different occasions and we slept together several times.For the most part it was awful and detached and I left San Francisco both times with an untterly broken heart.

In the dream it was raining and I'm not sure why we there, standing on that balcony. It was his family's home but they were out, to church or something. It was present time, meaning we were the ages we are now. We hadn't seen each other in almost ten years but there was an intensity between us right away.

At some point I was leaning  against the balcony's railing and it began to fall but Christopher caught me and we almost both went over. He was yelling, no, no, no. And then we fell back onto the floor of the balcony, and just like in a movie, we began to kiss, and just like in a movie, it was perfect and magical and we both just knew that this is what had been missing all this time, us, him and me.

We continued to kiss and hold each other and time went by and it didn't, meaning that we somehow spent a month together and at the same time, it was still just that afternoon with his family gone. At some point we found each other downstairs, holding each other again under a bus stop, the rain coming in sheets all around us. The thought occurred to me, I can't walk away from this. The thought occurred to me, I'm in love with him. And then the thought occurred to me to ask him if he'd heard that Christopher P. was married with his first baby and living in Vermont (all of which is true in real life). I decided not to. I felt, at the time, in the dream, that it would take the conversation away from us. He told me about places he'd like to live, by a lake, quiet and secluded and serene, just us. I asked him about children, did he want to have children. He did, he assented, and asked me the same. It was blissful. I remember the feeling of his body against mine, I remember looking up at his face, his eyelashes, he was perfect, I remember.

And then we were inside and his family was coming home. He didn't want them to see us together yet. And I suddenly knew. That it was all a lie, that he had tricked me or rather that I had tricked myself. That I in fact knew, for certain, that Christopher P. lived in Vermont with his wife and baby. My heart was screaming. It was dying. I fled through the kitchen and I found my journal and a pack of cigarettes. I must write all of this down, I thought and in the dream I opened the cover of my red notebook and I began to write it all down, just like this.

The Exact Words

I can't remember what his exact words were. I know he said, I'm sorry sweetie. I know he said, She's gone. Did he say, You didn't make it in time? Or did I say that silently to myself? I can't remember.

It was almost four in the morning. I was in a guest room on the second floor of an unfamiliar house in New Jersey. It was January and the room was cold and still, the way a room gets, the way a house gets after all its inhabitants have gone to bed and the fireplace has been put out and the house has settled and creaked and the lights have gone down one by one and all the people in the house, the middle-aged couple who live there, their college-aged nephew and his young female friend, have gone to sleep and are dreaming simple, quiet, dreams.

Except that suddenly I was standing in that guest room, in my thin t-shirt and underwear and I wasn't quite sure where I was at first, my head still cloudy from the vodka I had been drinking all night with Christopher, but I knew that his uncle was there in the room with me and that he was handing the phone to me and inside the phone, pressed so tightly to my ear, was my father's voice.

Honey, you didn't make it in time, he was saying. Would he have said that? She's gone, he was saying. He definitely said that. He was talking about my mother. He was telling me that my mother was dead. I was in New Jersey, in a thin cotton t-shirt, my bare feet cold on the wood floor and I was eighteen and my mother was dead.

Today

From an email I sent to a friend this morning...

I showed up hung over for my therapy session this morning (for the second week in a row) and was crying before I even walked in the door. I couldn't even speak for the first ten minutes. I just cried and folded a leaf of kleenex into a very small square which I then used to dab daintily at my tears.

Then I came to work and sat in Brent's office and continued to cry (I got a little snotty too) while he fed me V-8 and Advil and Perrier.

Now, with a dull headache and vapid tear ducts, I am sitting in my little office in Culver City watching the palm trees shiver in the cloudy sky.

Dear Claire

I received a Life in LA letter yesterday. I used to get a fair amount of mail from readers after the SMH article came out. It was amazing. I would get these incredible emails from people who had read my blog and who would, in turn, pour their hearts and their stories and their losses into these lengthy missives that would arrive so delicately and so unassumingly in my inbox.

It was truly a remarkable experience. I remember one letter from a man who wrote to say that he had just spent the last hour crying at his desk with his office door closed so that his co-workers couldn't hear him. My blog and my experience with my father had reminded him of his with his mother and it had evoked a lot of emotions. But he also wrote that reading about my experience had given him a much needed sense of solace.

I actually received a lot of these letters. It's common experience, really. Death. The loss of a parent. Caring for a dying loved one. But nonetheless it can be a very isolating experience. I found that to be the case when I was going through it. I didn't know anyone who was going through a similar experience and I'd certainly never met anyone who had gone through it at age 25. It never ceases to amaze me though what a singular experience it is for each individual.

There is a lovely quote from Jamaica Kincaid's book My Brother in which she writes, "What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, and if they can't go on and on, then they must go, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you can survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go."

No one but you can survive this kind of loss. So hard it could not happen to anyone else. I remember when I read those words for the first time. I remember putting the book down on the couch next to me in my little apartment in New York. How could she have written that so simply, so succinctly, I had wondered.

I went to see Kincaid read one night in New York. I remember standing in line after the reading, waiting to get my book signed. I was near tears. I wanted so badly to pour my entire story out to her, to tell her about my mother, my father, my pain and lonlieness. I understand this compulsion well. I recognize it in some of the letters I've received. I always write back.

The letter that arrived yesterday was from a young woman who has been caring for her ill parents for a number of years. She wrote about the struggle of it all, the complicated family dynamics, the challenge of attempting to balance her own life with that of being a caregiver. She wrote about the fear and the uncertainty. She asked me questions and she wrote kind things about my old blog.

She wrote, "When I found your new blog, I thought I would read that you had written a book and were still doing something related to writing in your work.  It really surprised me to read that you decided to do counseling.  It does make sense though as it's quite clear that you love to help people."

It was strange to read that. Strange in the sense that it made me a little sad and also a little proud. I'm a little sad that I haven't written my book yet. I still intend to. Truthfully, I think about it almost every day. And proud because I'm glad that it's clear that I like to help people. I'm proud that I'm the kind of person that helps people. There was a time in my life when that was far from the case but that's no longer true.

She also wrote, "I would love to hear more about how you coped with your Dad's passing between now and then in your current blog.  I hope it wasn't too rough of a ride for you.  You do an incredible job with expressing your emotions through the written word.  I'm so glad I found your blog.  Even though it's brought up a lot of emotions lately and started me on some sort of premature grieving period, it has also helped me figure a lot of things out about myself and my family."

I'm going to save my response to that for later in the week. Thanks for writing, dear reader. One thing I've learned so far as a therapist is that we all feel alone. The funny thing is that we really aren't.

One Year Ago...

I can hardly believe it but on Monday it will be a year since I went down to Houston to volunteer with the Hurricane Katrina survivors. For the last month I've been really consumed with visceral memories from that week.

I went to Houston with my co-worker Mac from 826LA. I think about 15 of us from various 826's around the country ended up going down but Mac and I kind of pioneered the whole thing. We flew to Houston on September 11, which was strange in and of itself because I had been living in New York when September 11 happened four years prior.

I remember how monumentous it felt to be boarding an airplane and on my way to witness another American disaster, four years to the day since I stood on my roof in the East Village watching the towers burn.

Mac & I arrived in Houston without any sort of plan. We had been trying to get people on the phone for a week, trying to get clearance to go to the Reliant Center so that we could work with all the kids who were stranded there. The plan was to do Storytelling & Bookmaking sessions inside the Reliant Center, where there were rumored to be around four thousand evacuees. But unfortunately, we ended up flying down there blindly, armed only with a hotel reservation and a shit-load of bookmaking supplies.

After we checked into the fancy Hilton (which of course lent itself to much cognitive dissonance even though it must be noted that the Hilton generously donated quite a few rooms to evacuees and as well as providing a pretty sweet hotel bar) Mac and I headed straight over to the Reliant Center. The place was a madhouse. For one thing it was enormous and confusing and cordoned off in a million places.

(Click on pictures to enlarge.)

There's a bunch of other stuff we had to go through to finally get in there like dealing with insolent Texas cops, hurried and distracted FEMA workers, and a really awesome Reliant Center worker who gave us a ride on his golf-cart, but I'm going to skip all that and say this: Nothing, not the NPR reports I'd been listening to for two weeks, not the footage on CNN, not the newspaper articles I'd read, could have prepared me for what we found when we were finally let into the evacuee area. First of all, it was the largest room I'd ever been and quite possibly the coldest room I've ever been in (Texans are serious about their air-conditioning). It was windowless and endless and despairing and thrilling and thought-stopping and loud, so incredibly loud.

And it was filled with people and cots and stuff, all kinds of stuff, all the kinds of stuff that are in your house right now that you'd try to salvage if there was a hurricane in your city and the government hadn't paid attention to all the things they're supposed to pay attention to and your house got flooded and you grabbed whatever stuff you could and ended up in a nightmare of relocation and emotional heartache and eventually an enormous windowless room in Texas with all your stuff.

Anyway, there we stood in the middle of all this chaos, trying desperately to take it in while at the same time trying to seem professional and like we knew what we were doing as we tried to convince the Reliant Center person we were talking to that it would be a good idea if we set up a bunch of crafts and projects in a corner so that we could try to help some kids. Meanwhile, the same kids that we were so desperate to help were whizzing by on big-wheelers and building forts with the cots and playing jacks on the cold linoleum floor and nobody seemed to be paying attention to any of them.

On top of everything else, there were these constant, booming announcements over the PA system, announcements like, "If you would like to relocate to Cinncinati, Ohio please be at the information center with all of your belongings and your family in the next five minutes. There are buses waiting outside waiting to take you there now." It was absolutely overwhelming and over-stimulating and I wasn't even one of the people who had just lived through a hurricane.

The next morning found about ten of us, laden with supplies and volunteer wristbands, setting up what would become 826 Houston for the next week. We had barely unfolded all the tables and laid out the crayons when kids just started appearing. It was amazing. They came out of nowhere and just plopped down and started coloring or making bracelets or telling us stories. They were listless and full of energy and rage and need. Their emotions yo-yo-ed across a thirty-second spectrum and we all tried like hell to be patient.

The whole week we never really saw their parents. This was mostly because the adult evacuees were either incredibly depressed and curled up on their cots under the florescent lights which stayed on even at night or they were standing in one of the endless lines which hopefully led to a person who would help them with food or housing or money or lost family members or legal matters.

The kids on the other hand were left to run loose and they were absolutely desperate for attention. We were told that we shouldn't pick them up or hold them but what were you supposed to do when a little four-year-old girl was pulling at your leg and crying, "hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me," or if an over-sized seven-year-old just climbed into your lap out of nowhere and started sucking his thumb?

And so the week went. We never once did a Storytelling & Bookmaking session but instead drew a lot of pictures, painted a lot of water colors, and made a lot of bracelets (the kind you made at camp with thin pieces of brightly colored string and a lot of accidental fucked up knots). One day we brought in a bunch of duct tape so that the kids could build forts out of this massive pile of cardboard boxes behind us. It was fun and wonderfully time-consuming and before too long they'd built this towering structure, the likes of which might never have been rivaled in the world of cardboard box fort-building, except that suddenly one of the littler kids took a running start and plowed straight into the entire structure, all the while yelling, "I'M HURRICANE KATRINA!" Not even a moment had really passed before all the kids were doing the same and that glorious cardboard monument fell with surprising simplicity, much like its predecessors: the city of New Orleans and the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

At the end of the week, enervated and enlivened (yes, both), Dave called to say that he needed evacuee interviews for the next Voice of Witness book. I spent my last afternoon at the Reliant Center lusting after Joachim Phoenix who had arrived to help out but really just stood outside smoking cigarettes and looking cashed out, and alternately interviewing an amazing couple named Austin & Aldrena Duncan about their experience getting out of New Orleans.

Their story helped me to see this country in a way I never had, taught me something about human endurance, and brought me to tears on more than one occasion. I've heard that it's one of the best interviews that was gathered for the book. Unfortunately, and by unfortunately I mean FUUUUCCCKKKK, no one has been able to locate Austin & Aldrena to do a follow-up interview. Therefore their story is not going to make it into the book. However you can read a quote from it and see their picture here.

A year. I know I'm in an entirely different place than I was a year ago. In almost every way I'm in a better place than I was a year ago. I hope that the Hurricane Katrina survivors are as well.

Dusk in Venice

Tonight I had to assess one of my clients for her potential to commit suicide. I never imagined that I would be doing something like that so quickly into this program, so early in my career.

Luckily my client was pretty low on the scale. She isn't very serious about harming herself. She's more interested in getting my attention and she's scared and she's had a horrible life and she just lost a parent and she hardly has any friends and I can't even imagine what it must be like to be her right now.

She's in another state right now, on the East Coast, visiting friends, but she feels alone and strange and hopeless. I held the phone to my ear and leaned against my kitchen counter as I listened to her cry. It was dusk in Venice and the palm fronds shushed in the breeze outside the windows.

I told her that I was sincerely worried about how she was feeling. I said that it concerned me greatly to hear her mention suicide. I asked her to promise me that she wouldn't hurt herself. I arched my barefoot against the barstool I leaned against and watched as the cat walked past me and into the kitchen.

My client promised that she wouldn't harm herself. She cried softly and I listened. I wondered if she pictured me at all while we spoke. I tried to imagine her in some strange living room somewhere, could almost see the way her mouth curved as she cried. I wondered if she pictured me as I am when she sees me at the clinic, in my slacks with my calm hands and my even breaths, not as I was at that moment, in a chemise, in my little kitchen at dusk, my ears full of her tears, my home warm and familiar all around me.

The Drowning

I dreamt about the bay again. I haven't visited that place, literally, figuratively, intrinsically, in a long time and I'm unsure of why it keeps surfacing.

In the dream I was wading through it, that warm brown water familiar like home around my thighes, the sandy bottom beneath my feet murky and archaic. I was far out into expanse of it, the middle of actual Choctawhatchee. I was returning home, the water spreading out for miles around me. To my right were several women, my Aunt Penelope whom I dislike and am estranged from, my friend Lucy with whom I currently have vaguely unspoken tensions, and then several familiar but faceless females.

Lucy and Penelope kept pushing me down into the water. Each time I rose, strong and unfazed. They continued this game, this pushing me down and into the water. I gave it to them. I could tell they wanted it, they needed it somehow. Finally Penelope pushed me down again but this time she held my head under the water. I waited patiently at first for her to release her grip. I was sure she would and that I would simply rise again, but her grip remained steady. For the first time I felt threatened and afraid.

I pretended to die. I let all the air stream in bubbles from my mouth, let my limbs go slack. Penelope's grip did not change. I waited, my lungs burning, my heart racing. And then I sat up in bed, gasping for breath. It was morning already and it was the last day of summer. 

California Living

I took this picture from the passenger seat of Lydia's Dodge Dart while we drove through Beverly Hills today. Just previous to this some dudes had rolled up next to us and yelled, "Hot chicks in a hot car. That's what California's all about." It's true.

More Dreams...

Last night I dreamt that I was meeting Christopher Filkins at a bar. I was excited to meet him because we've been meaning to meet for a long time, around three years in fact. When I got to the bar I spotted him immediately but what's funny was that in the dream he was Chris Finch from The Office. We sat across from each other and I ordered a cosmopolitan, which is something I rarely order these days. He was drinking a mimosa and the female bartender gave me this really short-tempered lecture on how much sugar and calories are in a cosmo and how she refused to be responsible for me gaining weight or having a sugar attack. After we cleared all that up Christopher and I were all set to get to know each other except I began texting him on my stupid phone instead of talking to him. I was writing to him about my ex-boyfriend Mike for some reason. I finally realized how stupid it was that I was texting him instead of talking to him, said as much, and put my phone away.

Last night my friend Lucy called me the Queen of Textas.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

Last night I dreamt that I was in Florida, at my old house, the one I write about it in the About section. In the dream I was crossing through the backyard of that house, on my way to a neighboring house to attend a dinner party. I suddenly realized that I was there, at my old house, 1053 Indian Trail.

I paused instead of continuing to the dinner party and walked out towards the dock. In reality that house had a large yard that backed straight up the Choctawhatchee Bay. The grass just ended and there was a fifteen-foot drop to the shallow, brown water below. I couldn't get enough of the bay when we lived there. I was always out in it, wading around with a net, catching and inspecting things, crabs, fish, shells. I found a dead deer once floating near the pilings. It must have drowned and it had clearly been dead for a while, all its fur gone, its naked flesh white and gleaming in the rust-colored water.

In the dream I walked straight out onto our old dock. It was dusk and the sky was low and heavy, as though it had just rained. The dock was decrepit and dilapidated and in the middle it bowed down into the water. There were slats missing and it probably wasn't the safest place to be walking but I felt right at home, in fact I felt really good about being there. I lay down on my back, right in the middle of the sinking part, that warm, brackish water lapping and familiar around me. I thought to myself, I've needed this for a long time.