For the last few weeks- months?- or so, I keep on having these wild and fluid dreams, or memories maybe. Like a flash of a picture of a place I may or may not have ever been, long ago or quite recently, all in a non-linear jumble. It is like the sameness of all of the days strung together is spurring on some daydream space-time travel, all of it equally real/unreal, so much so that I am left wondering what is reworked memory and what is simply fantasy. It is a bit disorienting. Like, I have been there before. Right? But was she alive yet then? That doesn’t seem quite right… but… which is it?
Is this happening to anyone else?
If I am actually dreaming, and traveling through worlds that way, the moment my lucid self tries to peer into the scene and figure what’s what, something all together different and yet, I am discovering, completely consistent happens. I remember Covid. And then in an instant, everything is wrong. Out of place. Too closed in, too close. In all of my dreams, Covid has leaked in so their meaning gets strewn and tangled. Lost. Chris says the same is happening for him. And then we lay in bed in the dark, trying to whisper over the baby’s sound machine, and I tell him my most opaque secret: I cannot have one single more person anywhere in the entire world die from Covid-19. I just fucking can’t. How can I? How can we??? And then I know it must all be a dream and I am back in that familiar space of all of these beaded days where the magic in my thinking is full of flaws, full of holes.
I practiced in my freezing basement this morning with Sam over the Zoom. Cruising through some of Christina’s backbend sequences. Feeling happy and lucky and playful. I showed her the giant wall hanging that Maple recently made for me. Not yet installed, but perched on a hook. Covered in glitter. The glitter is everywhere. Everywhere. The basement is glitter. And Sam said that she heard someone say that Covid is like glitter, once you open the bottle it just gets everywhere. Like glitter.
I am not sure why she made this big piece for me. She gets on a jag and she just goes. For hours really, leaning into some technique or texture until she unfolds that part of her mind into form . She has always been like this. It ebbs and flows and I have learned to look at is as the very best thing. A sign that we are on the right track. Even if it comes with fallout in the form of modge podge in my best dish. I need those signs right now. Especially because I can see how tired she is of all of these days strung together. How tired she is of us. Good grief, I love being with my people and I am sick of them sometimes. But she is about to be 15 and she is certainly supposed to be spending time with peers far more than she is with us. She needs space. Autonomy. Differentiation in new and uncomfortable ways. I get it. And it is still sad because I am certain that as interminable as this time is, day into day into day into day, it is also without a doubt, the last time that we will all be together in this concentrated of a way. I am not sure how else I feel about that.
She came downstairs to check in with me while I was finishing my practice the other day and she took a few pictures of me on my mat. From her perspective. Something that she used to do so regularly when I practiced and now I think it might be years since she has. That is how it goes. I am learning. Her view of me on my mat is always so unique. So distinct. I love it. She said she thinks that some of them really capture the time that we are in right now. They way my practice looks today. Often with a book of sequences and my laptop near. Layers of clothing. Both somber and cheerful at once.
I just love her so much and I am not sure what this rambling bit of writing is pointing toward except perhaps the only constant that I can always connect to, which if you don’t know yet, I’ll just tell you: it’s time. It is joy and sorrow in the same breath. Loss and longing and gratitude and wonder all mixed up with one another in this beautiful, heart breaking mess.
Stay well please friends. Life is so beautiful and fleeting and imperfect. I don’t want to miss anything and I really don’t want you to either. Be kind and stay awake for it. I think that is everything.