I come here, it seems, when my anxiety keeps the night bright as noon day. Everything's illuminated, especially the past, the microscopic, the opaque. It's the secret tool of the mind, like flashcards to memory, this awakening during night.
I'm reading a short story collection by Joyce Carol Oates titled, I Am No One You Know: Stories. It'll be the last Joyce Carol Oates' work that I'll read for a while, as I have other works lined up: George Eliot, Dorothy Parker, some volumes of poetry by various authors. Sometimes, I feel I read Ms. Oates' work, because the depth of sadness in her novels and stories pull me down with it, and I cherish the familiarity of suffering I feel, if only imagined, with her characters. The autumn and winter are heavy enough here in New England without such close attachments, I feel.
However, I'll miss her right-on sentences.
"You never think of it. How you die twice. Once when you're dead, & then when nobody remembers." Joyce Carol Oates, "Me & Wolfie, 1979"
I came across that particular sentence yesterday, which was, ironically, the anniversary of my sister's death.
This year, I've tried not to mark it, really. I've remained far away from my thoughts, scattering them, on purpose, through filters of forgetting. Yet, I've hardly been able to sleep for weeks, and when I do find dreams, they are vehicles for my discarded memories, bringing them back to me twisted and ill-matched, like a puzzle piece forced, against its will, into an incorrect place.
You'd think my dreams would know enough to keep the sky from the sea.
The sadness is less sharp, or rather, it comes on other days more easily, leaving the anniversary as a day to wade through, to skate over, to drown in, at my will. It's become so over the past three and four years, this easier passing of marking notches off silently.
All day, yesterday, my throat closed against speaking about it, although I wanted to speak to a couple close friends that this wasn't an ordinary day. But it was an ordinary day. Then and now.
I called my mother when evening was closing, to check up on her; I stayed myself against how slow time passes for my mother. Yet, my mother seemed to have forgotten what day it was. She only said, immediately upon hearing my voice, that she had been thinking of me, and my sister, and my brother. Why, I wondered out loud, and she replied only that she missed us and loved us, because we were her children.
I didn't mention why I had called; what day it was; why my throat had been closed up all day, and why I wasn't sad but numb.
I'm still numb. The slow-motion of how I experience the world while dissociating has moved inward and taken residency over my thoughts, my feelings, the pace of my breath.
Sometimes, against my will, death happens over and over again.