Quotidien
Last Wednesday I met M for dinner at a new restaurant in the neighborhood. It is just several blocks from my home. I was perhaps in a bad mood from the beginning, and M arrived a half-hour late. I should try to be more elastic, especially as I age.
In the short walk to the restaurant (which serves hand-made pastas and nice wines), I passed several tents housing homeless men and women. They're just across the street from me, on the other side of the park where I play catch with my dog. In the morning, when I walk her, a woman aggressively greets me. I am afraid of acknowledging her as she seems unstable, but my awkward, avoidant behavior seems uncouth, even if the desire for some kind of protective barrier is perfectly natural.
At dinner, I ordered wine and asked M if she'd like to share an appetizer and entree. I had forgotten she only eats meat and fat. She seemed offended. I ordered the squash ravioli and she ordered the chicken liver. Later, she told me that she no longer feels foggy in her head; the fat feeds the brain.
I typically allow M to make the decisions when we meet. In the past, she has said, you choose. But when I choose, she redirects the choice towards a place she would prefer.
My pasta dish was a primi piatti, not enough to satiate me. I dipped bread into the brown-butter resting in the plate's basin in order to suppress my hunger.
The day prior, I'd been unsettled by my therapy-session. I told my therapist I have prophetic dreams. About a week prior, I'd dreamt I was house-sitting for a lesbian-couple. The house itself, and my feeling about the couple, was warm, protective, inviting. But, my brother had somehow gotten into the house. I was taking a bath with the bathroom door locked; he knocked on the door, and, as in a horror film, was able to enter, and upon entering, had an erection. In the space of the dream, I knew it was my brother, but he didn't look how he looks now (in truth, I haven't seen him since December 2014, so am not aware of how he looks from day-to-day any longer).
A few days after the dream, my brother, who had been hospitalized, called me and left me a voice-message in which he calmly stated that everyone at the hospital was raping him and they were going to kill him in the middle of raping him but he wouldn't let them get away with it. He started the message with a tone of endearment - Sweet Jane - like the song. He hadn't left me a message with this tone in several years, and I didn't return the call. Perhaps that was cold of me.
I was, of course, ashamed to tell my therapist about the dream. He wondered if "something had happened" with my brother when I was a child. I answered no. I, for my part, was worried that my brain could come up with such a dream. I felt fragile, susceptible to unsettling thoughts or ideas, as if my brain wanted to make such things real, if only metaphorically. During the session I kept slurring my speech; I couldn't speak or access my memory properly. When I asked my therapist why this might be, he said that my "experiences are complicated." I may not always be able to locate speech to incapsulate what has occurred. But speech is the one thing I am typically able to access. I can talk for hours describing what's happened, as if dancing around the subject in order to avoid the feeling beneath it.
Over dinner, M brought up a case she's working on. She works as a pro bono immigration rights lawyer. They had lost the case that morning, and she was upset about it as it could be sited in future cases to support similar decisions. One of the lawyers under her supervision was defending a Mexican immigrant diagnosed with a mental disorder who had been imprisoned for assaulting family members with a deadly weapon. The judge in the case had to determine whether this man should be deported or not. The judge ultimately decided in favor of deportation, siting that the US does not have the resources to care for him. Per M's argument, this was a human-rights case. If he were deported, his care would verge towards the inhumane and it is our responsibility as humans to prevent him from such inhumane treatment.
When M began to talk of the case, my mind went towards my therapy session and dream, and I brought it up. She was worried the case might trigger me and sometimes avoids discussing her cases with me for this reason. I, of course, am a lay-person; she understands that a family-member of the man she was defending might not agree with her defense. I found myself struggling with making a distinction between the civil and the personal. How cruel the world is in regards to who gets care and who doesn't, who is born with what. I have sought to be self-sufficient so that I might always provide myself with my smallest need, so, shall I turn my eye away? And what is the relationship between the eye of the state and the eye of an individual? Shall I defend what I do because of a status-quo? And how do I graduate away from a fragility that leads me to avert my gaze from those things it is difficult for me to accept or let-be, as if to place a thick protective pillow around my being?