August 27: It’s been more than two months since my last entry. There is no blood on the keyboard. Dig deeper. Stop making excuses.
September 10: I have two recurring dreams, always a little different, but thematically about the same.
The first revolves around being in prison. I am there, behind bars, but not sure as to the reason why. I am in a large rotunda trying to sleep. I see the cells spiraling above me to a menacing sky, and a million hands hang palms down through the bars. I sense that people are watching me, their shapes evident in the rolling darkness. My brother is with me. He’s a lifer, I intuit and is wearing a light gray business suit, striped. I have a suit like that hanging in my closet. I am confused, disoriented, disturbed. I am saddened and panicked to realize that I can’t see my son. There are no visitation days here. I awake frightened and bewildered and sweat-drenched to the sound of my son crying. I go to him, and he is reaching through the bars of his crib, his hands open. He is soaking wet.
The second persistent dream I have is about my house. It’s raining and I notice that water is seeping through the ceilings on all three floors and it’s beginning to cascade down the stairs. I’ve had associated dreams where I return to the house only to see it ablaze. It’s always night and there are continually people scurrying about, faceless. I am never wearing shoes. I feel sadness for the house. I have little self-assurance in its ability to protect me. I feel panic and powerless.
September 29: I recall we had many large trees ringing our house. I would hear the branches twist and moan in the wind, especially during violent thunderstorms. I often worried about one of the limbs crashing into the house. That never happened but we did have to trim sizable, overhanging branches from time to time. We sawed down one tree, a gaunt Oak, and we used the stump as home plate. Watching the birdmen swinging from ropes, chainsaws carving, and spitting, made me anxious, nauseous. I envisioned myself falling. I am looking up and looking down simultaneously, and my world inverts—vertigo. I am Jimmy Stewart with both feet firmly planted in the grass.
October 16: The anticipation of an event rather than the event itself is the most fearsome. I finally deciphered the pattern—once the event had passed, it was done, and in the lull of that storm was the calm that I sought. There was always a new storm brewing on the horizon, I knew that, and the pressure would build and build, only to be released again. My life was a rubber band, stretched tight, over, and over, until the unpleasantness of the stretching became familiar and welcomed. Without the assembling tension, I am still uncomfortable today, because I need it to feel normal. How many times have I played out this progression? Stretch, stretch, stretch, release, recover, stretch, stretch, stretch, release, recover. My days have mostly been a continual loop of trepidation and foreboding. I can never truly relax because the cycle grinds to its own end. It is all quite awe-inspiring when I pause to admire the symmetry of the machine—the pulp notwithstanding.
I should have been a meteorologist as I am a walking weathervane.
October 17: Distance. Distance and perseverance were key, or so I thought. Looking back, I knew I had no choice but to play their game and play it I did. Unflinchingly, determined, purposeful. Knowing that escape, physical escape—a new city many miles away—would be necessary, life-affirming. My life would only be away games from then on. No more forfeiting, no more bowing, no more eating my words. Payback. I never wrote. I never called. I gave them nothing of me. Because I had given them all of me.
I did all that.
I am now free.
To battle me.
And the roiling horizon, my constant companion.
October 18:
October 19:
October 20:
October 21:
October 22: