i think I'm starting to talk here without saying anything. That's fatal for a journal. Let's see what I can do about that.
I am sick, I have a bad cold. No big deal. Except...
A few days ago I read another journal in which the writer talked about the likelihood of his early death from AIDS, and in his words I heard an old, familiar sound. It reminded me of a not so brief affair I once had with a similar sentiment. I wrote in a journal (when I did them by hand) on a bus going back to the Cape 14 years ago, that 'dying may be the most living experience of my life'. I believed at the time I would be dead from AIDS within a year. I loved it; the drama, the remorse, the pathos. Fortunately, the flamboyant director in my mind's theater does not direct reality. He surely influences my experience of it, though, and my experience most definitely influences reality.
Eventually my longevity forced me to revise my death. At first I ventured that my protracted demise would begin in five years, seven tops. The period of illness and suffering would be much worse, of course, since delay requires that the drama be intensified ten-fold.
Seven years later I wasn't even on meds yet. I'd had no opportunistic infections (I still have not had any). I revised again. It was the early nineties, and 2000 seemed for me to be on the other side of the river Styx. But here we are. Revise again.
I don't disagree with anyone. That's silly, because what's real for you is absolutely and undeniably real. And so it is for me. In light of all the revisions I had been forced to make concerning the so-called inevitables of my life, I began to change the way I thought about inevitables, about death, and most importantly, about how to live. I began to take the imaginary director a little more seriously, and we began a collaboration on a project called life.
He certainly is flamboyant, this director of mine. But he has a soul—and he knows how to use it. There are rumors, in my head, that he IS my soul. He suggests outlandish things, he lives outside the lines. He is patient with me, though. He knows more about my limited-ness than I think, at times, I will ever know about his limitlessness. But we are good friends, and he is teaching me how to not die.
and that all brings me back to this cold of mine. It's been getting worse for the last week. Some of the things that came up out of my throat yesterday I watched, just to see if they were moving. I expelled things that were like waterlogged scabs, enrobed in a thick pussy mucous. I thought this morning I was on a non-stop to pneumonia. But with the miracle of Motrin, a pot of coffee, and a meeting with the director, I can see much differently now.
I have ended my incest with death. But when I'm sick, I wonder about going back to it. I used to absolutely cling to death because I feared it so; indeed, I was convinced I was dying of AIDS for five years before I became infected. My fear may be why I made it come true. Carl Jung said that when the fear is of falling, the only security is in jumping (or something like that). But I don't need to be dying anymore. Sometimes I want to go back to that 'reality', but then there's the director.
One of these days, it'll happen. You know, death. But it's not really death I have ever feared, it's life. I could never have faced a death having never lived (and that's why all these things I've said apply only to me—unless of course you are just like me). Now that I am not quite so afraid of life, death has become much less of a problem.
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