I dreamed I slept in a strangers' house--a doctor and his wife. I had come in the night and I would work for them the next day, as household help. It didn't feel so strange - it was a small room but the door closed and I felt safe, so I slept.
But the next morning he woke me and showed me the room that would be mine--not the one in which I'd slept. It didn't have a door on it. It was brightly painted, garishly colored. I asked if I could have a door. He said they'd see what they could do, and he left. I started a pot of coffee for him and his wife and came back to the room. And that was comforting, that I had a place to be, but still it bothered me. Then I realized I was upset that there were no curtains. Hooks, and rods, but no curtains. I was among strangers alone with no door to close, no curtains to draw, and work to be done, no shelter, no answers.
I woke scrambling to fit it together, driving pitons with my mind, fighting for purchase on the cool face of fear. I woke completely -- I saw the apartment around me in perfect detail and I knew this place but it wasn't mine, either. I lay in bed, still, stricken, listening to the gallop-a-roll of my heartbeat rushing in my hear, the nightmare sound that I haven't heard for over twenty years.
When I was small that sound would wake me and I'd lie still, stricken, certain something was coming for me, and I'd lie quiet until the sound went away. It would stay as long as it wished and then recede into the dark. When you're small it's just a nightmare. When you're grown you feel that your own heartbeat is alien to you and the rushing of your own blood carries a threat, and you wake with abnormal clarity, scraping for something known, anything firm.
I woke and waited for the thunder to pass, and I thought of C, with his two homes: the one he can't get back to, and one he can't escape. And I thought of my one: the one I made for myself, that should have been for two but now is all mine. It's so far away, 2300 miles overland, but it's there, and that is the purchase I finally found and clung to, spinning. And then, lying on the dark sheets in the clear uncaring gloom of the light from the streetlamps, I was able to find the balance, to rebuild a reality, to turn and go back to sleep.
It wasn't a visit from the muse, but it was a reminder. He brushed me in passing, to remind me he was still there, to say he'd be back. I think he was reminding me that his visitations, like love, are not to be wished for unless I am willing to accept the consequences in full.
02:57:50 - 02-03-00
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