I am such an idiot.

I wish blogs had been around when I was young; back then I wrote a lot - mostly short stories. Of course, I also went through a Nun phase and wanted to cloister myself. Go figure.

I took one college comp course and though I did well -an A and a personal kudo from the prof- I was bored. In class we wrote by rote, framed by form. Anyone could follow the guidelines; I wanted to tell stories as well as Pat Conroy. Capture the reader’s attention, draw them in; if possible elicit as passionate a response in them as I’d experienced in the writing.

But I couldn’t write like Pat, so I stopped writing at all… and now, recognition dawns thirty years later that I might have cheated myself out of a different sort of future… Why can’t people have epiphanies younger in life?

The moral of the story? You can’t be Pat Conroy or Mother Theresa. But you can be your personal best, and that will be good enough; hell, that just might be great.

1.5.05

Well, that was the most unpleasant nocturnal mind warp in quite some time.

It began as I woke in the dream, my sleep shattered by a noise right outside the bedroom. And another. Fully alert, I scrambled for glasses and shoes; cursing myself once again because I refused to wear contacts to bed and awake blind.
As the noise continued unabated my feet made a path through the house I neither recognized nor liked. I don’t care for multi storied dwellings and this, it turned out, was one. Reaching a door I flung it open like a fish gasping for air in the hot shallows. I paused to breathe in the freshness of moist earth and hibiscus. I hadn’t realized how suffocated I felt before. This was much, much better. It felt normal. I felt normal. But there was still the noise that must be investigated.

Almost unwilling to leave the house totally, my fingers let go one by one, slipping from the door, allowing it at last to snap shut behind me with dense finality.

I traveled in the direction of the noise, through overwhelming early morning fog and moist greenery. As I got closer to my target -and wetter by the foot- it became clear: someone was hammering. The man who brandished the offending weapon was busily building a wooden fence right next to my house. Alarmed and puzzled, I called out for him to explain himself, but I couldn’t hear the words that were spilling from his O shaped mouth as written music. I can’t read music!

Turning, I hurried back to the door, now completely soaked through. Water dripped from my clothing, my eyelashes, the tip of my nose. My hand slipped and slid along the door jamb trying to find purchase and I fumbled into the house with one thought in mind: call someone about the fence that shouldn’t be there. Chilled, I took a blanket from the chair by the door and wrapped myself in it; thick and warm, it allowed my body the luxury of instant relaxation.

Until I made a 180 into two strangers. A man and a woman, in my home. The type you’d find running the local pub, under normal circumstances. The usual questions were asked but their answers were totally unsatisfying. There were candles burning in the house now; the lady had lit them for me, she said. The man made excuse after excuse for their presence. They were trying to look comfortable in my home but were doing a horrible job of it.
I told them as directly as I could to stay planted while I rang the police. Enter the wild denials of the strangers, which fell on deaf ears. It was wrong. The entire situation was just wrong, yet I couldn’t say why.

As so often happens in the dreamworld, they were there one moment and gone the next. Into thin air or out a side door in the house I didn’t know; and I instinctually latched onto the idea that something was amiss. Though I hadn’t been aware of it at the time, the hammering had ceased, leaving a silence so heavy it almost smothered me.

Calling my dogs, who had been mysteriously absent, I ran to an alternate door and flung it open. This must have been the main door. The outside was painted a deep blood red and it unfolded onto a street scene. It seemed my house was at the head of the lane and I could see down onto the rows of houses lined up.
Turning my head slightly to the left at the sounds of nails on the floor, two dogs approached. Not my dogs. A small brown dog and a larger tan hound, not my dogs. I started breathing heavily again, gasping for air, and forced myself to look back out the door with no little trepidation.

There was a large white dog at the far end of the street, walking toward us. It was hard to tell the breed because of the remnants of the fog… A Samoyed? It almost strolled, taking it’s time walking, yet I could feel it was an malevolent presence. Looking down at the two clueless dogs I felt exposed. Where was my big black dog; my protector?
The white dog was closer each time I looked back out the door and took better shape with each step. He was a dirty white, and he was little more than hungry wolf.

I felt the rush of adrenalin that starts in the stomach and forces the transfixed brain into action, racing upstairs for the gun that lives in my nightstand. It wasn’t there. My mind blinked, ticking off locations of stowed weaponry. I ran from one hiding place to the next, only to find an empty space where there should have been cold steel.

What else was gone; what more had they taken, those two strangers? For it had to be them, it must have been… My breathing became more labored and I wept as each nook and cranny was checked. The wolf was coming.
My jewelry was gone. I don’t have much, but each piece has such a special meaning; the opal and diamond ring, tennis bracelet… oh, not my pearls. Not the pearls. That broke me. My sobbing took on the words ‘oh no’ as I rushed about, trying to take inventory.

Oh no oh no oh no oh no…. Breathing in the OH and out the NO, that’s how I awakened. Crying and trying to catch my breath, I moved into Dingad’s arms which were already comfortably splayed as if he waited for me. I refashioned my position so he would spoon me, resting my head on his arm. Feeling the warmth of him rise to meet my chill I wondered about the wolf, and slept again.

Sigmund’s pocket lint could figure this one out, eh? I couldn’t see it until rendered in black and white.