by Tammy Vitale
It starts with me sitting in a car, the driver’s seat, waiting for him. A woman cop walks up to the right of the car and lifts the hood only it’s a right fender. I understand she is writing me a ticket for being in this parking lot. I tell her I am waiting for someone. She tells me the waiting parking lot is elsewhere and gives me directions. I don’t go. The scene changes.
In 2027, GRACE & GRAVITY will be edited and published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Submissions for Volume 12: Grace in Justice are open through November 15th.
He and I are standing in front of a woman. He asks me if I used sign language to talk to the deaf. I can’t remember what her job was, but she was standing by something like a big wooden easel. She was not an artist. I say I didn’t know I was supposed to use sign language.
When I move out of the car, I bring a pad and pen. I am writing questions or information on the pad and my pen runs out of ink. I ask the man behind the counter for a pen, and he gives me one. I finish writing on the pad and that’s all I remember.
I think I got into the parking lot by sledding down a very steep hill.
Dream Analysis
I am trying to communicate with myself. I am prepared with a pad and pen. But my communication tool stops working, so the universe/man/my animus (a Jungian construct for a woman’s male energy) gives me what I need to connect with my deaf self (symbols on paper, writing on paper, journaling). He wants me to get clear. The woman cop is also me and she told me to move and gave me directions, but I chose not to listen.
I wrote something on the pad and whatever needed to be communicated was and the dream was complete, needing no further story.
This tenth month feels like I no longer am treading water, feels like maybe now I will swim. I just don’t know which direction will take me to land.
The cop saying I couldn’t stay where I was waiting = time to move
Parked = treading water
Me in driver’s seat = in control
Me using “sign language” = writing is supporting me
Me getting a replacement pen when mine ran out = supporting forces I can’t see
As I research some of these symbols, I see my subconscious has been screaming at me and I have chosen not to listen (deaf/not listening).
Son: You don’t want to write a new story (pen runs out of ink).
Daughter: Why?
The Universe: Here, have a new pen.
Dream Redux
Everyone who touches us is a doorway.
In that touching we mix and meld energy, especially with people with whom we are close. That’s why I felt the tearing. Because I felt the tearing, it means I am awake. I knew what was happening but not how to story it (to spell it). A rewrite/ edit is where you do your additions and subtractions to what is already written.
The tearing was necessary for what? An editing. An open space for new energy. My energy was closed and curled around him and he around me. If indeed there is something that I must do without him, it means uncurling and opening.
It has taken this long to actually name and think about these things: no steps, no stages, no time frames. There is only me integrating the impossible, only me to story the rest of my life.
I wrote all that and then mowed the lawn, weeded pieces of the garden, put out nine bags of mulch, and paid myself in plants and two cookies from the produce stand. Full moon tonight in Scorpio: intensity, fervor, pink flowers; revelations of secrets, frustrations, desires; toss logic and transform. In a week, it will have been a year.
Meanwhile, I’m out doing the prescribed: meet new people, do new things. The wind is wild, whipping my hair into my eyes and mouth. In my head I hear you say, “I hate the wind,” and my answer, “Really? All these years and I never knew.” Call and response every time the wind blew. Then we would laugh the laugh of long marriage and known stories.
This morning, I whispered your name. Something howled but it wasn’t the wind. I knew what you were supposed to say. What you would have said. But without the call, there can be no response. Without the response, there can be no laughter. Driving in the wind-rocked car, I say out loud, “I hate the wind.” But that’s not the way it works. So there is only silence.
A week later, I hear a mourning dove calling. My mourning has turned to sadness from that wild wide-open howling. I no longer feel as if half of me is missing and in that regeneration of the lost half I seem to have encapsulated the howling pain to a quiet “wish you were here.” Not a tamping down at all. A learned way of positive redirection of thought. I put this on my mirror and whisper it, spell it, every morning: he is in the past for all my wishing otherwise and I am here and now and starting to look forward to making my yard into a total garden.
Dear Self: starting to look forward = hope.
Tammy Vitale is a writer, visual artist, and interviewer. She has been published in Potomac Review and Southern Poetry Review, among others. Her poetry chapbook, Shift, was given an honorable mention by Grace Cavalieri’s Best Books of 2014 list for Dragonfly Press. She has two public ceramic installations in North Beach, Maryland. She hosted The Arts Are Alive in Cambridge weekly for WHCP, the Cambridge, Maryland, local NPR station, and wrote weekly columns under the same name for the Cambridge Spy, interviewing a wide variety of local artists. Her extensive artist interviews over a decade of Artomatics in Washington, DC, can be found on her website, tammyvitale.com. She is writing a memoir about the year (+) after losing her husband of forty years.
