Moving... - 17/09/06

...to London.

Right before I moved to the East coast to go to college--jesus--14 years ago, I remember being wracked by a dream that shook me for days. In the dream, I'd been convicted of a crime and sentenced to death by hanging. All the loved ones in my life wept for what would be my imminent departure, but no one would tell me what crime I had commited and no one tried to help me avoid my fate. I remember my friends and loved ones, my sister and father and mother, all weeping for me. But no one could tell me what I'd done. And in the irrefutable logic of the dreamscape, fleeing was not an option.

Horrified, on a beautiful morning, I climbed the steps of the scaffold under a glorious sun that gave no warmth. The noose was put around my neck. I screamed for someone to help, for someone to at least tell me what I'd done. But the members of the crowd below the gibbet--friends and loves ones all--merely hid their faces in their hands as they cried for me, for my passing.

I snapped awake in my bed nearly screaming as my dream neck snapped.

I was horrified for days afterward. What on earth could that have been about? What had I done? Why would no one help me?

And then in a flash of understanding days later, I realized that the gibbet, my unknowable crime, my sentencing had been part of one of those all-too-perfect dream metaphors. I was in fact dying; my time in my hometown was ending and I was never going to return (and haven't since) in the same way. Those who cared about me wept for my departure but knew that it was the only thing that could happen. There was this slow, melancholy turning away. They felt as though they were leaving me before I left.

It feels as though the same thing is happening now. People I care about seem to be turning away, slowly shutting down, turning off the valves that connect them to me. I find myself thinking about the last time I may see a person again. Nostalgia strikes me at times with the force of an earthquake. I've had fights with people I love and found them throwing what we had down in front of them, like a porcelain doll whose face now horrifies them, doing all but spitting on the wreckage between us.

I look forward to London and a new life, being the stranger in a strange land, the observer, the outsider. But I am sad for the loss of this life, of this time, of this me...

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