2003-02-24 As Tigger lay dying

2003-02-24

status: early afternoon, Brian's house in Berkeley

The night Brian called me in Durham and said it was time for me to be here, half-seen things seemed to scurry around the dark recesses of the upstairs hallway. They looked like dark grey-brown ghosts in the shape of rats or slugs. I imagined they were the product of my overactive imagination, messengers and workers engaged in the errands of managing one life's transition into whatever happens next. I wondered what they were doing in my house rather than in Tigger's. Was my life somehow more in transition than hers? Were our lives so closely entwined that such a transition in her life would necessarily involve me?

Having watched everyone around me break into tears repeatedly while I have felt only the vaguest impulses of grief, at most a diffuse fog of sadness, I realize that I am still mourning Jenny more than I mourn for Tigger. Or is it that I'm mourning my own lost life? It's only been so very recently that I realized much of my yearning for Jenny was actually yearning for how my life should have been that it is still difficult to separate the two griefs.

2003-02-25

status: notes written on the plane

Airplanes are loneliness.

There's a ghost on my back. (Or are there two?)

The main reason I left when I did, I think, was that being away from home is painful.