Dream sequence

The last few days have been surreal. Sunday I went to yet another funeral, this time for a metal sculptor friend of a friend whom I knew only very slightly myself; I went as moral support and witness for my friend. We sat at a table in the shade with a very famous sculptor (also a friend of my friend) and his kids, eating ripe tomatoes and pomegranates and rough country bread baked in wood-fired ovens that were blazing away in the building behind just us at the back of this sort of artists' colony where he had been working for the last several years. His death was sudden but not totally unexpected. There was a simple ceremony, people standing to share memories, thoughts, feelings. I left wishing I'd made more of a point of knowing him while he was still here.

When I got home I checked my email, and found out that an old friend I knew in college had died the day before. A head-on collision, followed by six days unconscious in the hospital. It's strange to know he's gone, even though we hadn't been in touch for years. He was someone I would've been happy to hear from or see again, any time. I'll miss knowing he's around.

I don't like how I feel about this. Or rather, how I don't feel; after 20 years of no contact, I'm not feeling his death as much as I find myself thinking about it. For instance, I keep thinking about how, all those times when we'd be sitting in the living room of my old house in Utah, or cooking tomato sauce in that big old two-gallon pot, or listening to music together or talking or doing any of the things we used to do when we still knew each other—how all that time, the moment of this crash was out there waiting. For some reason I keep thinking of him in utero, and even before he was born, when he was just one tiny little egg cell inside his mother, when she was still in utero inside his grandmother ... because you know our lives are really much longer than just the time between our birth and our death. "The end is in the beginning, yet we go on." Who said that?

Anyway, I keep thinking about how at the moment that cell was formed, this moment was present. And how we're all hurtling toward that same moment in our own lives. It irritates me for some reason that it's considered morbid or negative to acknowledge this fact. It's not negative! And it feels important to remember it, every once in awhile ... not necessarily that I'm going to die, but that at this moment, I am in fact still alive. There's so much to be grateful for in that. And actually, coming back to Stuart, the friend who told me he was gone said he'd told her recently that he was really loving his life lately. Knowing that makes me happy.

So that was Sunday. On Monday morning I woke up at 3:15 a.m. to drive the boyfriend to SFO for a ridiculously early flight to the center of the continent, where he's doing a contract job this week. I'm almost never awake at that time, let alone driving on the freeway, and after I dropped him off I promptly lost my way back home. I had planned to drive straight back up 280 and be home in time to sleep a couple more hours before work. Instead, I found myself somehow back on 101, staring out across the black water at the lights of Oakland and thinking about an old boyfriend who lives there, whom I hope never to run into on the street or in the park or at the beach or anywhere else. Then the road rose up and I was negotiating a perilously narrow series of snakey overpasses that finally dumped me out in the middle of the eerily empty Mission, where each light magically changed to red at my approach and stayed red for the full two-minute (or whatever) cycle even though there was never another single car in sight (strangely beautiful, the city without cars). At the end of Mission Street I waited at another red light, staring at the clock on the ferry building as it moved from 4:59 to 5:00 to 5:01 ... then gliding silently past Pier 7, where that poor woman drowned her three children last week ... and then suddenly, somehow, making my way through Fisherman's Wharf. And then there were hills, and curves in the road, and then the dark bay again with the Golden Gate bridge blinking patiently in the murky distance ... and then the marina, and then finally the big sign that says "No toll northbound," and then the sweeping curve of road that lifts you back onto familiar ground again. And then the bridge, and Marin, and big giant trees in the fog and then, just as I pulled into my own driveway, the numbers on the dashboard blinking from 5:58 to 5:59—which meant that if I ran, I could still be back in bed by 6 a.m. But of course by then I was so adrenalized that I couldn't sleep.

I guess I still haven't quite recovered from the disturbance to my routine, because I've been feeling spacey and weird ever since. All day at work yesterday I held on through my exhaustion by telling myself I'd be out of there by 4:30, spend some time regrouping, and go to bed early. Then there was a server crash, and an emergency on the press, and then another emergency with some film that had been handled incorrectly, and the new night person needing help with one thing and another, and for some reason I was the only person still there to deal with any of it (even though none of it was in any way my responsibility), and by the time I got everything taken care of it was almost 8:00. Tonight was somewhat more normal—the last farmer's market of the season, followed by Nepalese food with the usual Tuesday night people—but I'm still feeling really out of it.

Anyway. Not to complain. I'm just feeling kind of strange. Somehow all those images of an empty, artificially lit San Francisco, and the darkness of the bay, and all the lights beyond it, keep swimming in front of my eyes. I keep wondering if that's what Atlanta looked like in the dark, at 3 in the morning, when Stuart's accident happened. The thought of it kept me awake while I was driving bleary-eyed across the city, and it's still keeping me awake. I can't get the picture out of my mind.