11:11 - Saturday, Jun. 11, 2005
a web inside my throat
Last night I had a nice dream about dying. Those are not unusual for me. In dreams, I am more scared of the unexplainable, or unexplainable things like being unable to move my fingers or the sky being black in the daytime, than just straight, simple death. I was walking with Camille and Nick down 9th street, in a flashback. I knew that I was going to die sometime in that time slice before I returned to my apartment. I wondered idly how, but I thought I knew, or at least was pretty sure. I had a parachute strapped to my back and it was windy. Every time I jumped in the air in the right way I would fly off, rising, in the rain, coming back to Earth only when I lowered my arms. I figured the rain was going to turn to sleet at some point and cut the strings of my parachute, and I was going to drop to my death somewhere on the Pearl Street Mall, which was a grassy hill. It didn't happen, though, and I kept jumping and gliding and jumping and gliding, enthusiastic because I wasn't dying, but also increasingly uneasy because getting my parachute strings cut by sleet sounded like a great way to die and there were some other ways that weren't so great that I would rather not have happen.
After probably ten minutes of jumping and gliding, I came back to my friends because it had begun to thunder and lightning. We stood there for a second, looking towards home. Camille wanted to try my parachute, but we were all shifting around the obvious. Finally, she asked me, "I wonder how you're going to die?"
When I was parachuting, I knew I shouldn't be in the sky, the highest point around, when there's a storm, just out of habit, but when I got to my friends, standing by the Hop stop on the Boulder creek bridge, I suddenly knew.
"I bet you're going to get struck by lightning," Camille said.
"I was..." I began, and then lightning was coming down, slowly but brilliant. I huddled closer to Nick. In the dream I wasn't thinking that lightning could transfer persons; plus, I knew he didn't end up dead because in death there was nobody else, just me and my ability to flash back.
The lightning hit in my right hand, and my last thoughts were how it feels to get hit, and then people who get it survive, sometimes, and I can see how, but it wasn't painful, just tingly and arresting. And I tried to say goodbye to them, but it was like trying to talk in any dream, trying to run in others. I spoke clearly but the sound just reverberated in my head. I thought it was because of the electricity, forming a web inside my throat that trapped sound, and sleep, inside.

17:08 - Friday, Jun. 10, 2005
i warned you
DISCLAIMER: This entry is going to be one of those exploring-my-inner-psyche-and-probably-making-cheesy-blanket-self-help-type-statements kind of entries. If you do not wish to explore my inner psyche or most likely feel as though you're being preached at even though it is myself at whom I am preaching, please visit, like, somewhere else or something. If you do wish to experience the above things, fool, read on.

Resolutions, vows, promesas, or good advice from now me to future me that I can choose or choose not to follow then, but if I'm smart I'd better at least consider it:

1. To read life like a novel. By this I don't mean detached; I realize that some people may be detached while they're reading a book; they have that certain feeling of maybe the book being sad, or angering or intense, but it's not happening to them and therefore does not affect their emotions beyond the borders of the pages, and anytime they want they can put down this book and transform back into reality - but I am not one of those people. For as long as I can remember, I haven't been able to read sad or intense or unsettling books after dark. I'm not really a night person. I don't like to stay up late, have multiple hours in the dark and the cold, watching old movies even, or curling up with a book. I like having the option of, on a whim, being able to run outside, hop on my bike, and ride down the creek path all the way to 55th street, or past, if I want to, or go on a 15 minute hike to the red rocks. The thing about night is that it negates options, and with it, much of the outside world. The world becomes my house, the room I'm in, the lighting, the spiderwebs, the temperature. My stomachache, my heart tweaking. Nothing outside counts because it is inaccessible to me, for the moment. With so little and tenuous a base, I add a book and my world explodes and merges with the book, even as I take deep breaths and breaks and assure myself it isn't possible. If the book is happy, great, but most good books aren't happy because happy isn't interesting (for proof, please refer to my diaryland entries directly after Nick and I got together), and I quickly and quite irreversibly become the criminally insane character who's frantic with paranoia (The Talented Mr. Ripley had me paralyzed for an entire sleepless night.). My mind and body are tricky because they work together to make me think my mind isn't smart enough to make my body hurt, when it fact it is, and it does. I locked all my doors when the sisters were about to be murdered in "In The Time of the Butterflies", and positioned myself out of gun's reach of the windows. Reading "House of Leaves", I could not turn around, and my stomach did; turn around, I mean, over, and over, and I checked my closet for vomit and my hallways for hidden doors. I read "The Curious Incident of the Dig in the Night-time" during the day, which was good or else I would have become autistic, or as close to autistic as a non-autistic person can be. Most often, though, and across examples, it's just that intensely sick feeling you get when you're coming down with food poisoning or are in grave danger, and if the character is in grave danger, I am, too, and I get the side effects.
What I mean, though, by reading life like a novel, is not to experience my life sickly in a dark room curled up with horrors, obviously. What I mean is I'm not going to read sad books at night until I learn to get a grip on myself; what I mean is to read life like a novel that is just one part of a much bigger pool of novels. I don't mean to get less intense about things. I did that most all of high school by taking antidepressants and I wouldn't go back to that now. I just mean to get intense about things and then sit back and realize that the intensity, the anxiety, is not the end of the world and does not compose the rest of my life, and that it's okay to be intense and sad and hopeless if it's transient. The way it is now, I am afraid that something is going to catch me inside a whirlwhind of terror and I will be caught there interminably, wandering insane and nobody will know. But things are transient. That's the saving feature of it all.
I plan to continue switching minds every time I wander into a new environment. I plan to continue having the worst cabin fever ever on a rainy day and wishing I were dead and then having the mindless afternoons of Dr. Mario and Tetris, and then on the next sunny day be riding along the creek and start thinking the most astonishing things in my head like 'I love life, and I love Boulder'. I plan to continue daydreaming in writing class about how, if I really tried, I could write something approaching the level of those short stories in our course reader (and even surpass some of the more terrible ones), instead of listening to the Bill Clinton-like drone of my teacher talking about five paragraph essays. I plan to completely keep switching again when I walk into jazz class and hear Louis Armstrong and the lightning chord changes of the rhythm sections and the fat guy playing bass and promise myself that when I get home I'm going to take out a beginning jazz book from the library and go from there, because every time I think I'm thinking of something new and uncharted, the teacher shows a video and it turns out Louis Armstrong already invented it. Going from there,

2. I will stop looking at talented people with competition on my mind (especially if the talented person in question has been dead since 1971), which is just a flowery term for jealousy or resentment, which is just not ever beneficial or healthy. It is possible, and even enjoyable once you get used to it, to sit back and listen to music without wondering obsessively how you're going to surpass this guy's creativity, or read a short story without pooh-poohing the author's excessively complex threads, when you know it's actually brilliant but don't want to say so.

3. I won't yell at Nick anymore. More specifically, I will not search in my head for something to yell at him about, then yell it at him. If I have to think of something to yell about, I probably don't need to do it. Also, if I have to purposefully omit parts of reality in my head and embellish others to justify yelling, I probably don't need to do it then, either. Exceptions to this resolution are: if Nick leaves five mixing bowls and two pans and all our silverware in a big heap in the sink covered with brownie batter and then goes to California for the weekend again, or if he makes me pregnant against my will and then robs me of my life savings and moves to Mexico, leaving me penniless to raise my child (again - Jesus, Nick, don't you ever learn?).

4. I will do things I'm afraid to do. As impossible as that seems at the time okay I'm bored with this, I will finish later or something.

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