supplicium post mortem

We should’ve got up late. It’s a holiday, and although I had things to do, they weren’t until later. I should have woken up with him wrapped around me, his hand doing something to my nightclothes so he could feel my bottom. He would whisper into my half-asleep ear about Marky, how naughty he’d been, how TL ought to see him in the afternoon and do a proper uniform inspection. He’d whisper to me about Casey, too. RP and TL had decided that she had got out of hand. She hadn’t been misbehaving, though, I’d protest groggily. No, he’d agree, and that was a symptom of the problem. Things had been too hectic, and clearly she was in need of some quality time with Mr. Prior. Movies? I’d ask. Across his knee, more like, he’d say. I’d cuddle back to him, feeling him pressing against me. We’d carry on along these lines until the wolfhound came to the side of the bed and licked us, whining that we must get up. He should have taken the dogs out in the sub-zero morning. I would have made the coffee. He insisted it tasted better when I made it.

Perhaps we would have pottered around doing chores until my physical therapy appointment. It should have been a day when both Casey and Mark got seen. Mark would have reported to TL’s study, or the house-room. Casey would have been summoned upstairs to RP’s crimson study—the one I keep thinking I ought to use more as a writing space, but can’t. I should have told him about the dream I had the other night, in which I was some rebellious prep-school boy cornered by an exacting master, my nemesis. He was going to give me six, and they were going to hurt, a lot. He told me to bend over, and he produced a fearsome (and improbable) cane, rigid and ridged, rather like Abel’s walking stick. I/my boy avatar was scared. The master held the cane against my bottom and waited. I mentally prepared, told myself to breathe, not to clench, to stay down, that I could take it. Still, he waited. I trembled. The door to the study was open, and passers-by peered inside. Yes, the master said to the peeping boys, this is what happens when you break the rules. He lifted the cane; I inhaled; the alarm rang.

Today was the kind of day that could remedy interrupted dreams, though I wouldn’t fancy a RL encounter with that sort of stick.

In the real day, I dragged myself from bed when the wolfhound insisted. After throwing the ball around the sub-zero park, I dragged the dogs home and embarked on morning chores. I organized the chaos of unrecorded to-dos. I tackled some email. I went to physical therapy. I walked around the city by myself imagining tweets I would write if I had a smart phone, and things I would do if it were the day it ought to be. I went to Muji and found a pair of pyjamas that fit perfectly. They are what M would call whack-me pyjamas. I thought about how much he would like seeing Casey in them, and how cute she would be in them.

And I thought about how he was the one who really got ripped off, not me. I have more life to live, I have great friends, I am healthy, the rest of my family are all alive, I can pay the bills, I have great dogs and a nice place to live, a garden in summer, neighbors who look after me, the best church in the world, and the love of God whether I deserve it or not. He didn’t get to live more than 45 years. He didn’t get to see his son grow taller than him. He didn’t get to have children with me. He didn’t get to read the things I’ve written these last three years. He didn’t get to read the things I’d written when he was alive but hadn’t shown him yet. He didn’t get to see me Sunday night, at the story slam competition where I read After the Party, a little fantasy featuring someone like him; he didn’t get to see me wearing the tartan skirt I’d just bought; he didn’t get to see me win the competition. He didn’t get to grow old. He didn’t get to see his projects blossom. He didn’t get to be with me when I really knew how to love him.

It feels perverted—and by this I mean fundamentally unsound—to put on outfits that look cute when there’s no one around to appreciate them. The Russian lady who inflicts bikini wax (plus) on me insists that you do things only for yourself, my dear, not for anyone else, only for yourself. While there’s something comfortingly self-sufficient and feminist and self-actualized about that, the sentiment rings hollow somehow. Connecting with others, depending on others is part of being human. I tend to agree with R.R. Reno that the opposite of piety isn’t unbelief but sovereign desire. So perhaps I can be forgiven feeling unsound wearing cute outfits that he can’t see anymore.

And of course beneath my noli me tangere exterior, I secretly long for attention. I’m not exactly the kind of girl to ask for it, but I get jealous of other girls who garner attention. Having been round the houses with this once before—coming out of my twenties—I’d say my reticence is not coyness, but a kind of armor. I know I can’t have the sort of attention I really want, so rather than seek out something I think will frustrate and hurt me, I work on ideas like humility, on not looking to other people for validation, on being grateful for what I have, on getting used to the idea that this will probably be it, and that it’s enough to get through the day, and I’m not in a war-torn nation, not oppressed, not cancer-ridden, not a million bad things, so I need to stop feeling sorry for myself and try to be of use to other people.

In the day that should have been RP would have had a chat with Casey about this attitude. He would have reminded her of her Four Things. He would have paid her several sorts of attention. In the evening M and I would’ve watched House on tv. Would he have liked Lie to Me, or would he have found Tim Ross a plonker? It would have been–should have been–the kind of day where you don’t mind that it’s winter, that the night comes soon and lasts long.

First, please know that I love my family very much and would be lost without them. They are good to me and stand by me and are nice to me and believe in me and would stick up for me any moment.

But here’s the thing: no matter how much you love them, at a certain point it’s healthy and right that you grow up and start your own life. You don’t leave them behind, but to some extent you escape that first family. I had done this. It took a long time for M to get me to see that we had a new family now. The parts of the old that weren’t so great—these we didn’t have to have. We could make our own traditions. Yes, we’d still put my childhood ornaments on the Christmas tree, but now on Christmas eve, he’d make mince pies and we’d listen to his Britpop Christmas CD. And yes, my parents will always be my parents and I love them, but in a way, I didn’t have to be that child anymore. RP was looking after Casey, so the old life was past, and the new, better, realer life was here. And I could love my sister and mother and all the rest, but with his help, I could take them with the right amount of salt, and when it was time to leave, we went home to our house that we had our way, to our dogs, to our bed, and to all the secret love we had together. At our wedding, we’d given ourselves to each other in Christ, and now this was my strongest bond. This was the new family, the new life. I wasn’t living in my childhood house any more.

Today I had Christmas brunch at my apartment for my mother, my sister, and my sister’s childhood friend. My mom had unexpectedly been staying with me since Thursday due to a minor medical emergency. Her difficult dogs had been in my way, frazzling my nerves, keeping me awake, and increasing my workload. I am coming down with a cold due to lack of sleep. We all had a fine time, I guess, but by evening, I really wanted everyone to go home. I had had visitors for 3 weeks and needed to spend some quality time with my dogs and do the zillion things I had to do to get ready for my UK trip tomorrow.

Except no one was going home. My sister and her friend were lying on my bed watching agitating videos on their phones. My mom was feeling weak and had gone upstairs to nap. It had become clear that she and her dogs were staying another night. I took my dogs around the block.

On a quiet, dark side-street, I leaned over someone’s wall, buried my head in my arms, and started to cry. I felt trapped by this family—a family I love but want to escape. I wanted my own family, with M, the one I thought I had, and I wanted the kids we were trying to have, the twins. I wanted it to be Christmas in the new life, with him and our children, and our dogs, and Casey and Mark and all the others. I wanted us to be able to come home from being with my mother and sister, but instead, my house was invaded by this old family. And no matter how much I love them, it just feels wrong in a way for them to be so much in my house and life—the house and life I should have with M.  My mom and sister think it would be fine, in the absence of a husband, to have a turkey-baster baby and bring it up all together in kibbutz. I feel physically nauseated by this idea. It is simply incestuous. But lacking a family of my own, now, I can’t seem to get them out of my hair.

It would be one thing to be a life-long single woman. But to have got used to the new family, and now be back with the old… I know it’s colossally ungrateful to say this, but it feels like getting rescued from the orphanage and then having to go back.  But I’m emotional, and I don’t really feel well.

There’s a blizzard headed into town when my flight to Englandland is due to leave tomorrow. My house sitting and dog sitting arrangements have grown inordinately complicated and unsatisfactory. My mom isn’t well and who knows when she’ll be better, or how much help she’ll need, especially with her horrible dogs. I am thinking this trip was a terrible idea. I should stay home, quit trying to make it happen, just take care of my mom and my dogs, and get some work done over the school break. It was selfish and stupid to try to make it happen. And kids in orphanages don’t get to go to parties.

I know I’m not being very rational. Things usually look better in the morning. I’m not a cynic about Christmas. I love Christ. And I’m so grateful for everything I have, and all the friends and family who love me. Still, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed today, except the part about turning out the light at the end.

Earlier this week I had a vivid dream in which I was a schoolboy being caned across the shoulders, á la Stalky & Co. It stung quite intensely in the dream, and over the next morning, I fancied I could almost feel it.

Reality, I’ve never been caned anywhere except the bottom, and I consider this a hard limit. But Stalky was such a formative influence for me (detailed exegesis here); it obsessed me from the age of sixteen into my mid-twenties. It is responsible in large part for transporting my childhood tgi (orphanage & prairie focused) into my young adult tgi (English Public School focused). All the other English school literature that I read–and I have read pretty much all of it–I discovered after or through Stalky. For instance, when I was seventeen, I spent hours at the 42nd Street Library reading ancient copies of Dean Farrar (Eric, or Little by Little and St. Winifred’s, or the World of School) because the characters in Stalky mocked him so scathingly. Despite the eccentric (and to me entirely perplexing) fact that the Head in Stalky “licks across the shoulders,” I responded strongly to those scenes of punishment because of the relationship between the Head and the boys. The whackings, like all the stories, are under-written and vibrate with human tension and understanding. Because of Kipling’s obliqueness and the nearly incomprehensible world of the English Public School (to a teenage American girl pre Harry Potter), I found myself trapped in a kind of tractor beam with Stalky, utterly fascinated and attracted, yet grasping at meaning. I couldn’t, for example, understand how a person could be caned across the shoulders (or that this arose from the school’s military background) — wouldn’t you break a collarbone or something? I wondered. I had not yet encountered the species of light, whippy cane that could accomplish this task and yet leave Kipling’s heroes in once scene “within an inch of blubbing.” Generally, I pretended to myself that the Head was dispensing normal canings and left it at that. He wasn’t, though. And in my dream recently, I (my schoolboy avatar) was receiving just such a USC licking across the shoulders. It was all hot sting, no thud, rather like an intense and stripey sunburn. I’m sure that must be exactly what it feels like, lol.

And if this dream were not enough, last night I dreamed I was playing a school-like scene with John Cleese in academic gown. I was wearing blue-jean overalls, the kind I gave to Marky that first December we spent together fifteen years ago. (It was such a good December, and even though we had to spend Christmas apart, life carried so much goodness and hope then. Emotions ran high, low, and every complexity in between, but it was like eating and breathing for the first time, not having realized before that I was missing anything… turn back, o time…)

So there I was, and John Cleese was telling me to bend over. I gasped at the first stroke, more from surprise than pain. He carried on briskly, and while I felt them, they weren’t unbearable. I kept still and quiet, which I sensed was frustrating him. But seriously, I thought, does he expect me to howl the place down when he’s whacking at perhaps medium strength, over jeans and pants, and I’m not exactly a fainting beginner?

You can tell I was dreaming because in reality it’s been so many years since I’ve felt the cane that I might as well never have had it. Why caning dreams, though? I never dream of these things any more.

Yesterday while getting physical therapy on my elbow, I lay on a cot gazing out the darkened windows, thinking. Here I was in this dark, wintry, modern world, going about my affairs, while my characters waited for me in their English summer of 1926. My schoolboy protagonist, in particular, waited for me  to take him through whatever this fire was that he faced, to make him into the person he yearned to be. I thought of him in my dark, Gotham evening, but did he also sense me somehow from within that world where I long to be?

It isn’t just my characters that I carry around inside myself this way. There is M, and Marky, RP and all the others. I can feel them, too. Where are they? Where are they all?

Perhaps in contemplation of my New Year’s Anglo-Irish jaunt (weather permitting), last night I dreamed again of parties.

In this dream, I was visiting some friends, Mr & Mrs Lovely, before a party they were to give. Mr. and Mrs. Lovely were sitting on chairs, but another American visitor and I were lounging around on the floor. We were all joking and bantering. Mr. Lovely, American-friend, and I were sort of wrestling. Cheeky remarks and gibes were coming out of my mouth. He wrestled with us playfully, but he didn’t push it when he felt my uncertainty. American-friend wrestled differently, like she meant it, like she wanted to lose to him, like she intended to get herself smacked.

Soon the hangout dissolved, American-friend went upstairs, and it was time to get ready for the big party. But Mrs. Lovley was berating Mr. Lovely, telling him to figure out a way to get me to play. She felt it was his duty as a man to get creative and help me out, “so that she can get past this one place and start to live the rest of her life.” Mrs. Lovely had the idea that I was frozen about crossing this threshold, and that simply being able to play around at a party would draw me firmly into real living. She felt somehow that if I remained an observer at this party, I’d be missing a chance to stop being an observer of my own life. He, paterfamilias, needed to take initiative.

I’d earwigged their conversation and was burning with embarrassment. The thing was, I explained, I was deeply ambivalent about playing. Mr. Lovely was paying attention to me now, and the vague quietness I’d observed when visiting in the summer was now a kind of pregnant sensitivity. We faffed around in this uncertain tension until I asked if I shouldn’t simply list all my fears. Mr. Lovely said, “I think I’d concentrate on the possibilities.” So I picked the thing top-of-mind: Just who would be seeing little Casey?

To ask this question was already to have come a long way off the sidelines. To voice this question revealed that I was capable of imagining Casey being present. I was in fact already imagining falling into her, and into her clothes, and secretly inside I already was starting to feel like Casey. The question revealed, also, everything about how I play: in role. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say: wearing a costume so that other people can see what this inner me is all about.

I couldn’t endure the idea of playing as X (my real name) because X is a grown-up, pulled-together, balanced person. She isn’t especially fragile (though she isn’t the iron clad maiden she was in my 20s), and even though she manages a certain amount of frank vulnerability, it’s all on the verbal/literary level; it isn’t immediate or physical. There’s an adult distance about it all. To play, though, means to allow forward a part of myself that is not very X. This part I call Casey, and over the years with M, Casey developed beyond a label and into a full-blown person. ¹ To play as Casey, who is an extraordinarily vulnerable little girl, more so than when M was alive, is to make visible the psychological reality of playing itself.

So Mr. Lovely and I were pondering this question: who would be seeing little Casey, and why? I explained again, as if it needed explaining, that she was scared, bereaved, lonely; she would not be very robust. Yet, someone dealing with her couldn’t allow her fear and bereavement to dominate. The point, as Mrs. Lovely had put it, was to nudge her over a frontier. I don’t think she   would cross it willingly, but if she turned up to a scene, that would be consent enough. At the same time, if someone steamrollered her, or gave the impression that he didn’t understand her, or didn’t base his command on that understanding, then she would merely comply in a mechanistic way. It would be robotic, and not only fail to accomplish any threshold crossing, but it would scare her away worse than now.

Understandably, Mr. Lovely found this all a bit overwhelming. Mrs. Lovely and I went shopping for the party, and on the way back she almost ran over a bunch of schoolkids. I yelled and grabbed her arm; she swerved to avoid them, just. She was angry at me. I apologized for yelling and for touching her. She said that she was never going to hit them. I very much doubted it.

Back at the house, I hoped to find Mr. Lovely to talk. I was beginning to imagine a scenario—the very fact that I could imagine something seemed to be a hopeful sign. What if, I wondered, Casey had brought home a bad school report? It would be terrifically shaming for her, since she’s such a good student. She would have bollixed up the first term at her new school out of an inability to join in. The same reticence that kept me on the sidelines at parties would have caused every kind of problem at this school she was attending. She’d avoided homework and then avoided the consequences, she’d offended teachers with her silence, which seemed to them churlish and sullen. They certainly didn’t understand her, and this had made her worse. It was a train wreck.

A discerning interlocutor would be able to see what her teachers couldn’t see. He would realize that she didn’t need yelling at, that she was already ashamed beyond endurance, and that it was her sadness and this boil of emotions that needed addressing, not her homework per se. At the same time, she had not behaved as she ought. She had declined genuine offers of help. She had indulged in procrastination and avoidance. Most importantly, she had allowed herself to carry on until she reached the state which now tormented her. How could she treat herself like that?

It couldn’t be a guardian with a real relationship, because that would be fake. Casey has no relationships with anyone but TL. But what if it were the man of the house where she was staying over the holidays? He, perhaps, knew some of the staff at her school, perhaps her form teacher. In any case, he had her report in hand whether or not he’d any right to it, and as a grown up, as the best available representative of loco parentis she had just then—in that fleeting, un-ideal moment—he intended to have a word with her, even though he had no previous relationship with her, even though he would have no serious relationship with her beyond that holiday. He didn’t appear bothered by the unofficial, presumptuous character of the interview. He was paterfamilias, she was a child under his roof in need of guidance, he intended to provide it. End of story.

The dream ended before anything could happen, before I could even speak to Mr. Lovely again. We were in a building high up in the Gotham skyline, almost as high as the Empire State Building (where M and I met). A storm came upon our skylighted room, blowing rain in the cracks. I woke up.

I overthink. I overimagine. I rehearse excessively in my mind. But it was always this way. M and I wrote over three hundred long emails each before meeting. We, especially I, explored tgi and ourselves from every possible theoretical angle. I can’t endure reading the correspondence, in part because it’s too grievous, but also because it’s so very tedious with all of its intellectualizing. I hope I’m not intellectualizing that much now. But, as I live alone with my dogs and my computer, words, dreams, and thoughts remain my chief vein of experience. And I suppose this kind of rehearsal is preferable to an impetuous, confused, disaster of a real-life play encounter.

Of course, party play isn’t the same as deep play, and role play as other people know it is, I suspect, a distinctly different activity to playing Casey. I don’t know, yet, if there is anyone amongst my acquaintances capable of playing with Casey. Besides, being on the sidelines of parties isn’t a bad thing. At least it’s being at the parties.

And—just as I was bringing this to a close—let’s not leave before putting under the microscope the glories of my reserve. If I stepped off the sidelines, it would mean sacrificing this quality of mine—that I don’t play, that I am charming and nice and only a visitor from afar, that I am not a pawn in gossip, not an adherent to one side or another in whatever drama is unfolding, that I possess a lofty wisdom born of distance and of not having a horse in the race. Why should I want to give any of that up? Then I would be just like everyone else. I would be part of everyone else. Feuds and tensions would involve me. What I did and said would start mattering to people personally; I would start offending people on more than an intellectual level.

And—this is the heart of it, isn’t it?—I would grow attached. My massive, neglected needs would come out of the deep freeze, and then where would we be? I will tell you: in torment. I would have allowed myself to need these people to the core (with Casey even!), and then I would be all alone again at home in Gotham.

Also, I know my heart. It is essentially monogamous. Certainly it has room for friends, deep true friends, but that is distinct from its central longing. Which is a way of saying that even if I did live in the land of parties and could join in on equal status as everyone else, I would still be…well, wounded after an honest encounter via Casey. Wounded in the sense of having undergone a surgical procedure.

People talk of sub-drop, but this is more serious. Sub-drop as a term implies a neuro-chemical depression after extreme stimulation. Like a hangover or a post-cocaine crash. You did something very intense on a physical and emotional level, so you felt “high”, you “flew” as some people like to phrase it, and now, as a prelude to normality, you have come down from that high, a disagreeable descent.

I’m not looking for a high. I’m looking for a Real. I’m looking for a breath of real, intense air on this planet where I have not been able to respire. You flew, you dropped—a normal course of things. You finally breathed, now you must again hold your breath—not.

If I was still 26, if I had never lived a real life, this would not be so difficult.  But I have. I know what I’m toying with. I know what kind of heart I have. I know how it feels to live, how it feels to be a phantom, and how it feels to long for a life I can’t have. Of these three, it’s the last I dread most.

He died nine hundred and twelve days ago. Oh, dear Lord, that looks like such a very long time.

Today I’m up at my mother’s house. Casey’s bear “RP” is doing all right after the break-in, by the way. I’m sitting by the fire, in the chair he used to sit in. A few minutes ago, it seemed like I could see him in this chair, wearing the gray pullover and fleece hat he liked to wear up here (probably in one of the drawers upstairs I haven’t been able to clear out yet) and banging away at his old laptop. He was intense when he worked, and it wasn’t always possible to interrupt him, even for hugs. I can see his jeans, his old running shoes, and his unshaven face.

Is it that memory that is real and this life a type of perverted reality? Or was that life more like the substance of the stories I write?

Slight variation on the He’s-Back dream last night: He was back! I had plans to go to a tgi party in New Jersey, but now that he was back, I figured I’d bring him along to meet my friends. I thought it might be fun for him, and maybe he’d like some of them. I was booked to take a bus out there with a group, and so I was calling the organizers to see if there was a spare seat he could have.

And as I was talking with one of the organizers, I referred to M as “my guy.” But wait, I hesitated. He was more than my “guy”. He had been my husband, and now that he was back, it meant he was my husband again. I had a husband again! Except I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring. I went to my drawer to get my ring and his. Had he noticed already that I wasn’t wearing my ring? Would he feel hurt by my bare finger? What about my wardrobe? It is ordinary now. He wouldn’t know from looking at me that I’d worn all black every single day for more than a year, and only black and gray for two years, that I had only branched into mild color recently, that only last month did I put on the jeans I’d been wearing the day he died. (I still haven’t put on the shirt, and I gave away the bag I’d been carrying.) But he could only see me as I am right now–non-ring-wearing, average wardrobe, no visible signs of being yet attached to him, of considering him my husband.

Nine hundred twelve days later, I still do. Who is this other person living inside my body, going around without rings, attempting to cultivate connections to this empty, bleak, and cruelly beautiful world?

LOL Day, as you probably know by now, stands for Love Our Lurkers Day. This event has for the last five years been organized by Bonnie, as a part of her ongoing, devoted efforts to bring people together. So before we go further, Thanks Bonnie!

casey in her boater hat this summer

As this blog has ground nearly to a halt, it probably has no lurkers left. But in case you are new or not-new and still lurking–a warm hello. Maybe today will be the day you leave a comment and delurk? While you’re thinking about that, here are some pictures of casey in some of her hats for you:

When I started this blog, in a half-blind urge to speak of the part of my lost marriage I couldn’t speak about with everyday people, I thought no one would want to read a blog with a subtitle like “whacking, bereavement, God.” Who besides me would want to read about all of those things, what’s more at the same time? Apparently, there are people who do, and many of those people have become real friends. Without those friends and this blog, it’s hard to imagine what would have become of this shrouded part of my character and my experience. To those friends–giant hugs.

If you’re a return or regular reader, you will no doubt be thinking: why doesn’t Casey blog more?! I’m not entirely sure, beyond the normal excuses of life getting in the way. But if I were to be really honest–and what are blogs for if not that kind of risk?–I suppose I could guess a couple of other reasons:

1. Bereavement. It continues. How many times can I write the same thing? I am wary of losing friends by turning into Casey-one-note. So increasingly I keep it to myself.
2. 

   winter uniform hat

   Ambivalence about The Scene. As you might have gathered, I’ve gone to a few parties in the last two years. I haven’t yet played with anyone else. I haven’t had a romantic date. I haven’t kissed anyone. As time goes by I wonder, increasingly, whether I ever will do any of those things. Many of my friends write about their play dates or parties, but I don’t want to write about these things. First, I think it would be churlish to write posts about liking but not liking a certain party. Ditto with writing about being depressed by prospects. If the Scene depresses me, it isn’t because there’s anything wrong with the parties or people at them, it’s because of a mismatch between what I need and what’s on offer. So, I don’t see how it’s productive to complain.

3. Anxiety about outing. Because I work in a sensitive sector, and because of the integral role church plays in my life, the prospect of being outed scares me. I’m quite cautious in my face-to-face encounters, and I try to be careful about what I write, but sometimes fear grips me, especially when I read about other people being outed by vindictive former friends/partners. This has made me self-conscious about some of the fiction I write because it strikes me as the most vulnerable part of this blog. I have no inherent qualms about the stories I write or the kinds of experiences that attract me, and I find them all fully compatible with professional integrity and with my fairly orthodox religious beliefs. My worry is that my interests are so open to misunderstanding. I mean, I live in a cosmopolitan city. If my employers or fellow parishioners were to read that I got up to a bit of kinky adult sex in my marriage, so what? But there is a lot in my writing that could be misinterpreted. So I worry.


casey's peruvian hat

4. Real world writing. I do write fiction in my regular life, and that has been waking up from bereaved coma and taking more of my time and attention over the last year. When I started this blog, I thought of it as a kind of CPR. The CPR has more or less worked, and while I do not feel like a whole or healthy person, I can’t say I have not been resuscitated.

In other news, I fell off my bike and broke my elbow last month. I’ve acquired a roommate/free lodger in my sister’s boyfriend, who fell victim to some shady real-estate maneuvers and found himself evicted with 4 hours’ notice last week. Before he moved in, I had visitors staying for six of the last ten weeks. Besides that, my garden has been very busy and demanding (until elbow broke), the various channels of work are very busy, and the current novel is moving itself to the front burner. So there you have it. Nothing too thrilling.

I think, on this day of appreciating friends known and unknown, I’ll leave you with a passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. It’s from the end of “Friendship”. I do like what he is saying about Christian friendship, but I also think it applies to all true friendship.

Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends “you have not chose one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others…They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

If you find posts about teddy bears twee, maybe skip this one. Or you could go read Mija’s story about her bear, which is a better story and more exciting.

This weekend I found myself at a small toy store with my mom. She wanted to get a new bear for my sister [B, age 33] because mom’s new poodle had savaged and destroyed B’s bear that she’s had since she was 2 and in the hospital with a broken leg. We found two bears we liked, and my mom was trying to decide between them when Casey appeared. She told my mom that a) the two bears didn’t want to be separated; b) she needed a jealous present if B was getting a bear; c) she especially needed a bear because of her bad dream this week; d) she had her pocket money with her and could buy it herself.

Because I have such a terrific mom, she got the second bear for us! And she doesn’t even know Casey by name.

When we got home, the new bear told Casey his name might be RP. She was excited and surprised! RP, you mean like RP? But what does it stand for? she asked. He was like: Er, Real Pal? Casey and I weren’t sure about this. It’s possible the new bear was trying to make her feel better after her dream, and wanted to be what she needed. Personally, I doubt that is his name; I doubt he’s even too sure of his name, or else he’s embarrassed about it and doesn’t think it’s good enough so is trying to reinvent himself for Casey.

Anyway, we slept well with him even though he was pretty scared and unsure that first night. On the one hand, he was elated to be got from the store, since he had heard from the jumble of plush friends under the counter that it was possible never to be got from the store. So that was a dream come true. Even better, he was got with the other bear who he knew. They rode home in the back seat together. But then Casey’s bear went up on our bed, and the other bear went on B’s bed.

At bedtime, Casey’s bear was really nervous. He’d never been anyone’s bear before, and although he’d heard about it, he wasn’t at all sure how to do it. Plus, even though he was super-grateful to have his dream come true and be got from the store and become someone’s bear all in one day, he was strangely lonely for his friends at the store and their friend-pile under the counter, and even though he knew he shouldn’t feel this way, he wanted to be back at the store, which was the only home he could remember.

Even though he didn’t say any of this, Casey sensed it and hugged him and told him he was going to be a great bear, and in fact already was, and that she’d never had a bear Up Here in the yellow house, and that she was in fact hugely in need of one, especially because of her bad dream about her lost grown-up. At one point the bear asked if he could go talk to the other bear for a minute, but Casey was falling asleep and mumbled, In the morning. The bear was sad and wanted to cry, but maybe partly because it had been such a big day and he was tired. So he decided to be brave, and soon he was asleep.

In the morning, Casey took him into B’s room and left him there to talk with the other bear. They were so happy to be reunited! And Casey’s bear felt at this point like the older, experienced bear (even though B’s bear was a little bigger) because B’s bear was very very scared and lonely, having spent the whole night on B’s bed waiting in vain to find out whose bear he was. (B wasn’t there that night.) Everything Casey’s bear had felt, B’s bear felt even more! So, Casey’s bear set to making him feel better and told him this was a good house and also what you had to do when you became someone’s bear.

The next night Casey’s bear felt more confident, though still not perfectly confident, and they had another good night’s sleep even with her sore arm and worrying about having to wake up early. But then this morning he got unsure again because Casey had to explain that he was going to stay up-here in the yellow house while she went back to town, because he was her up-here bear. He really wanted to be her always-and-everywhere bear, but he was trying to be brave.

Wadsie

The trouble is, Casey couldn’t bring him back home because Wadsie, who is so very insecure, would feel so bad he might die, and then she would  not only have lost her grown-up, but also her oldest bear that she’s had her whole life.

Wadsie was insecure even before RP went away, and one time M said to me that Wadsie had told him a secret: Wadsie thought that if  only he had been a better bear when Casey was small, she wouldn’t be so sad now. And since RP died, Casey has been inconsolable at best, and most of the time not even here, and Wadsie’s truckle-bed gets closed a lot, and he is getting flatter and his stuffing older every minute, and he is 41 years old in people years, though he’s not completely sure because that is a lot of counting.

Moose

And it was bad enough that time Casey and I went on a retreat in Vermont and Casey got Moose, but Wadsie and Moose worked it out so Moose would live in the study and help us with our writing, and Wadsie would stay Casey’s bear. So, given all this, Casey cannot bring home the new bear (whatever his name turns out to be). But, she explained to the new bear that a) she would be back next weekend and b) she needs him to watch the room while she’s gone and make sure no bad stuff gets into it and c) she needs him to welcome her back every time she comes up to the yellow house so she can have a real bear up-here.

Wadsie in his truckle bed

Casey told the new bear that she probably wouldn’t need comforting after whacking—which is a big duty of bears generally—because she didn’t have a grown-up anymore. But she also said you never know; maybe if they were both very lucky and God loved her as much as she heard about him loving people, then maybe she’d get another real-deal grown-up, and her up-here bear could meet him and would get a chance one day to comfort her that way too.

The end.

When I was little, my family went to a local amusement park once each summer. It was called Boblo Island, and it was on a little island in the middle of the river. You would drive Downtown and board an old-fashioned river boat, one with wooden dance floors and windows selling cotton candy, and you would ride this boat an hour or so out to Boblo Island, where you would disembark for the day. Boblo was a good amusement park with kiddie rides and adult rides, but although it occupied the entire island, it wasn’t as extensive or as ambitious as places like Cedar Point or today’s Six Flags parks. Still, I remember entirely happy times there, on rides like the swings or the flume or the tilt-a-whirl.

The Comet

For years and years—into my 20′s—when I would get scared or very unhappy, I would summon to mind Boblo Island to soothe myself. I got into a habit in my 20′s of staying up far too late at night and subsequently freaking myself out with fear of ghosts. When this happened, I’d think: Boblo. Boblo! and I could avert a panic attack. I haven’t called upon the Boblo talisman in years, though; I don’t think it holds sway any more.

The other day, while I was kicking around the corridors of bereaved quasi-madness, the dogs informed me that regardless of my mental, spiritual, or emotional state, they still required their evening walk. Teary-eyed, I leashed them up and we went round the block.

I felt fragile, hung-over from crying, and not entirely in control. My mind ranged to friends I could call, but found none that seemed appropriate at that moment. Then my mind embarked on a fantasy involving some friends I visited this summer. It’s weird to fantasize about your friends; it’s the kind of thing you don’t confess out loud. You wouldn’t want your friends to think you were obsessed with them, or unattractively unstable, or clingy-needy-gross. But I suspect a lot of us do this secretly.

As my dogs were sniffing their way around the block, I was imagining going to the cottage where I had visited these friends of mine. It was cold and rainy around the block, and it would be cold and rainy at the cottage, too. My friends, the couple who owned the cottage, would welcome me, in my ragged, teary, distraught state. She would enfold me somehow and speak to me soothingly and incomprehensibly in Irish, and then make me sit in front of the turf fire while she prepared something for me to drink. He would secure the cottage and assure me that everything was quite safe, that nothing bad was going to happen there, and he would fetch me a dog to pet and cuddle. The two of them would sit with me and not say very much, although she would periodically come out with an unexpected, impulsive remark that would make me cry because it was so shiningly true. They would treat me half as their child and half as their friend. The rain would blow against the window panes, and the dog would be damp, and I would be safe and soothed and understood, and uncrowded there in the cottage with my friends who were in some ways so close, and yet distant enough that I could be entirely myself with them.

That is the kind of secret Boblo Island that comes to me now, when I am 41 years old and so very grown up, and don’t know what I am doing in the world.

I’m going to try to write this without turning into a sobbing mess, and also without turning into a crazy person who gets locked away in a mental hospital.

This afternoon I had a nap. I dreamed it was raining, like it’s been here the last two days. I felt that I needed a wee, and this segued into the idea that Mr. Prior was going to see Casey, and gosh she hoped he would let her go have a wee and not have to wait. They were outside, sort of in the neighborhood here, and we heard RP moving some furniture around in the old study, to arrange things for the scene. And it was so comforting to hear that and to be with someone who did that. Casey wandered under some newish, young wisteria leaves, and the leaves brushed lightly against her face and head, just shielding her from the rain.

And then Mr. Prior was there, finding her. “A lot has changed, hasn’t it?” he said. “Like a big, gray hat.”

And then, in a flash of recognition—that he was there, but not there, not for long—she threw her arms around him. He had on his white shirt and black trousers, and it’s possible in the dream that he was taller than she was, like RP “really” always was. And she said something to him that I can’t remember, about him being there, really being there, physically in the flesh, because she could feel him and he was so warm and solid and smelled like himself and everything. I think she asked him where—WHERE—he had gone. And he said she should hug him and then say a little prayer for him, that he was going away and going to his maker (except it didn’t sound corny in the dream, it sounded so sincere and so delicate and so him) and that she should—

She interrupted him and clung to him even tighter, saying No No NO! And then he was going away, and we were waking up, and she was holding on as tight as she could ever hold on to anything, yelling that she wouldn’t allow it…

FYI, that hope at the start of this entry isn’t going very well.

There have been countless—and I mean that literally—times since he died that I’ve sobbed so hard I thought something physical would break, so hard I felt maybe it could kill me. This was one of those times, and it carried on even after I got up off the bed and went for a wee and got  a glass of seltzer and did the bodily things that usually accompany the exhausted calm after a paroxysm of grief. Except that it carried on, and I was still shaking, and Casey was breathing in that shallow catching way, and sobbing, and I felt in the twilight of madness, as if I might encounter Ophelia or Hamlet. And I wanted to do something Desperate, but I couldn’t think of anything to do.

This is the first time that Casey had her own dream about Mr. Prior of the type I have about M. I used to have those dreams a lot. He’s here again. He’s back. He isn’t dead. Even, I know he’s dead but he’s here just for a moment. I hate those dreams. I really hate them. They’re cruel. Lately I haven’t had them much.

Then this morning I did have one:

It was early morning in my kitchen, and M was back. In this dream, he hadn’t actually been dead ever, just unconscious so much that everyone thought he was dead. But now he was back! I was so glad to see him, and there was a feeling of ultimate ordering and rightness. Everything was in the right place in the world, and none of the suffering that had come before mattered any more. I kept touching him, embracing parts of him, and again he was so physically, tangibly present. I thought of the life insurance money I’d have to pay back, and how difficult that would be, but I knew it didn’t matter and that we’d work it out. He was tired and curled up in a ball on the kitchen table. I convinced him to come to the bed, which was still unmade from me getting out of it.

“See,” I said, “your part is still there, and your pillow.” I smoothed it so he could lie down.

Then I remembered his job—the job he had held when he died—was actually open again. [This is true in RL, and also in RL it is a job I applied for 3 times after he died, but was rejected for 3 times, for confusing political reasons.] In the dream I had an epiphany: it all made sense why I had been rejected from this ex-job of his I wanted so much, and why they’d been through two other people since he left and had the position open yet again—it was a Divine plan, and now he could have his job back! I didn’t want to overwhelm him explaining all this, but I told him his job was open and they were desperate for someone and he should call, or let me call for him, ASAP. And like the sense of ultimate order at his presence, this coincidence of the job felt like a kind of justice. My suffering had not been senseless or for nothing. It was all a part of something good the whole time. Because he was home!!! And even though he still had the aneurysm and could in fact die any time, or live on for years, I didn’t care because he was there in that moment, and I knew that was all that mattered, and the future didn’t matter, and the past didn’t matter, only now, here, with him, so tangible and so real.

That was 6 o’clock this morning. Twelve hours later, Casey had her dream. I don’t understand all the symbols in these dreams. I don’t have the will to try.

Dear God, we really cannot take these dreams any longer, and we cannot take the reality either. We are bleeding everywhere there is to bleed. We are boring everyone with this same message. Please. Please. Where is the volume knob that turns loud enough to make you hear?

Please.

Recently I had the opportunity to inspect a friend’s toy collection, cleverly hidden inside a hockey bag. She had some particularly appealing straps, which I found myself wanting to try out on Marky. She also had several nice canes. (If my friend is reading this now, she will probably be shouting that the word nice should never share a sentence with the word cane.) Even more surprising than the desire to whack Marky was the discovery that after more than two years, my eye was still “in.” I discovered this when I arranged some patio chair cushions over the back of my friend’s sofa in preparation for demonstrating the art of caning.

Back in the day (e.g. when M was alive and I actually topped from time to time), I was the inferior top. He had better aim, better everything. I was a pretty shabby top altogether, I always believed. Now I think my insecurity wasn’t entirely accurate. When I took my friend’s canes and applied them to the misbehaving cushions, I found my aim good, my wrist snappy. My friend seemed to think I was hitting hard—and it was only 50% or so. I started to think maybe my topping experience hasn’t been normal, only having topped one person, a boy who liked to take a lot and hard.

Now, back in my own home, I have begun to wonder if I actually possess implements any more. I think they must have disintegrated in the closet, or got lot permanently wherever I put them away that I can’t now remember, like my work SIM card, or my husband.

A few days before encountering my friend’s hockey bag, another friend showed me her flogger. It was purple and brown and beautifully crafted. She let me touch it, and it seemed like it could be soothing and massage-y.

“Do you want to try it?” Friend Two asked casually.

I froze with a polite smile on my face: “I don’t know!” Friend Two didn’t push it; she just set the flogger down on the picnic bench where we were sitting. I remarked that if she’d told me it was a massager, I’d be all over it, but the word flogger was too scary.

But scary how? Certainly I wasn’t afraid it would hurt. I was afraid, on some paralyzed emotional level, to have anything to do with an object labeled Flogger. To use a flogger on myself , or to let someone else use it on me, felt at that moment like it would be crossing an invisible yet indelible boundary. It would mean engaging with kink on a level beyond the verbal. It would be in a way like a first kiss—the first kiss in this life after M.

My real first kiss (excluding stage kisses) came very late, at age 20, and by that time kissing had become a barbed, electrified barrier. I’m not sure I remember my first kiss with M. (Insane!) I remember the hug when we met for the first time, on top of the Empire State Building, and I remember the heavy make-out session on my futon, the first time anyone had touched me in a few places, and how hugely, overpoweringly exciting it was, like nothing I’d ever imagined.

But as for the flogger offered to me casually as a mere sensation experiment, I must have frozen because I was afraid to cross any physical barrier into anything that smelt even vaguely like kink. (How I hate that word, but when I use my word, tgi, people always ask me what it means, so I come off as elitist, speaking a dead, obscure code. But I miss that word. Lots! Come back to me!!) To have played with the flogger, even lightly in fun, would have been to step off of the sidelines and into the play. I wonder if on some level I was thinking, or Casey was thinking: If I do that, then people will start misconstruing my conversation and think I want to be whacked, and I don’t. Just like Casey was saying (it must have been her even though I didn’t know her name yet) before that first kiss at age 20: If you kiss a boy, it means you want to have sex with him.

I was terrified to kiss that first boy, but after two nights of faffing about (and confirming with my promiscuous roommate that kissing did not equal consent to intercourse), I finally kissed him. It felt strange, but not bad. His mouth tasted of popcorn, which he had been eating. He was a freshman and I was a junior, which was seriously robbing the cradle. I remember that night he asked me what I wanted. I was still adjusting to having crossed the first kiss frontier, though I didn’t tell him that. He said he wanted a Relationship, and asked if I did, too. I said I’d like to get to know him a little first. We dozed off, fully clothed, in my narrow university bed. A couple of days later, I heard in the dining hall that he’d started dating someone else. I was blindsided, embarrassed, crushed… Still, it was a good first kiss. I wasn’t in love with him.

Besides first-kiss boy and M, I think I’ve only kissed two other boys. I am 41 years old, and I know this is not normal. My sister makes out on almost every date. Even if she’s bored with the guy, she’ll make out with him to see if he gets more interesting. I haven’t kissed anyone except family, on the cheek, since I kissed M goodbye that morning 26 months ago. It’s not that I’ve resisted; there’s been no opportunity.

by Richard Dadd

Still, if the opportunity to kiss a man ever comes again, I’ll probably be afraid to cross that threshold. I think in person I can come off as very reserved, bordering on cold or conceited; the truth is I’m scared, paralyzed in a way that makes no sense when I explain it. I’m scared of sex, scared of kissing, scared of playing, and apparently even scared of touching a friend’s leather toy if it bears the label flogger.

In the Land of Fairy, you must never eat the food or you’ll have to stay there. If I eat the food in this new world—this hateful world without M—will I have to stay? Of course, this world isn’t like Fairy. We’ve got to stay no matter what, and there’s only one way out—the way he already went.