Dreaming of Warmer Times

                 

Shivering through another frigid winter, I remember telling myself last year that I wasn't going to do this again, and yet, here I am doing it again.  It is a little different this time, my daughter and her kids are in the house, brightening it up; also, it is a colder and snowier winter than last year though at the time, it didn't seem possible.
In the long cold, I am followed by ghosts, and though I do not believe in ghosts, I believe in photography, and I think that the images we retain of our lives and how we experience them imprint and that imprint remains after the action and emotion has moved on.  In this way, nothing leaves, not the sweetness, nor the unpleasant after taste, even though one often follows the other.
I looked towards inevitable bereavement as a thing to be feared, yet now that it has happened so many times as to be routine, I find myself less alone than anticipated.
Friends are dead, parents are dead, people have drifted off in other directions or moved out of reach, yet they stay with me, and the time that our paths ran parallel affected the trajectory of mine.
From another life I remember love, but remember it now as a dream interrupted by a loud noise.
I was dreaming I was young and pretty and had a man I loved wildly.  We were traveling in winter in his old silver Chevy, sleeping in the back, couch surfing at his friend's houses, and I no longer remember being cold.  I remember the warmth.  Today, I remember that precious time that I could not keep, and no matter how hard I tried, I didn't know how to be the pliant, obedient female he wanted, nor could he be the man who was on my side that I needed.  Though it ended in acrimony, only the sweetness remains.
It is important for me to remember also, the loud noise waking me is my own howl for freedom.

Silence

I keep getting the impression that underneath all that I experience is a deep silence.  There isn't any tinnitus there, no whining, no children fighting, no blaring screen, no sudden upsetting noises.  But is there also no laughter, no music, no breathing of a nearby beloved person or pet?
The silence of the house when my family is out feels like a void, I expand into it, and then, pretty soon look for ways to fill it up, food, music, moving furniture around, messing with bicycles.
Last year, I filled it with worrying, eating carbohydrates at an incredible rate to bury the worry, and as it turns out, I had only been burying myself.
Well, no more of that forever; my body has said it won't take it and is going to propel me into that deep silence before I have had a chance to do a few more things with my life.  Go to Yellowstone again.  See some other parts of the West that I love, and some I haven't seen yet.  Return to Europe with my own bike this time....and time, and time.
I want to wander the roads of Italy where I lived, in what at this point feels like another life, sit quietly somewhere with a picnic lunch, and maybe a friend or 2.
I want to fall in love again, which probably seems absurd and as ridiculous as it has ever been now that I am old and have nothing but laughter to offer anyone.  It disturbs me, though, because I have been in an emotional fetal position for some years now, and it isn't how I want to live my life.  I may not ever be able to shake the sense that there is nothing anyone will see here to love, but I need to know that I can love, whatever it looks like, reciprocated or not, aimed at a human, an event, a house plant.
That silence, the silence inside that looks like loneliness is one of the dangerous sucking voids most of us face, I think.  Poor judgement blooms from it and crawls around like Kudzu, and just about as fast.  Sitting still and experiencing the isolation of resistance will send anyone to the gambling table, the bottle, the needle or the refrigerator.
Our belief in our isolation is what kills us.
Not that we don't die, but dying is not the problem, the state we are in when we do is, and the only solution I can see for that, at least today, is today.