Beyond the Veil.

I dreamt in the minutes between snooze-button pushes this morning. I dreamt a friend of mine had used again, and for some reason my dad and brother were there to clear his house. As my brother questioned whether they should remove his name from the gun and case and cleaning kit, my father said no, and looked sternly at my friend, as if to convey he’d better have learned his lesson.

This skips to me in bed with my friend who really had used again some months ago and overdosed and died. His back to me, both warm with that early morning light flush, that gently pulsing intimacy between two people in bed. I peek over his shoulder at his half-hidden face, just seeing the ragged scraps of unkempt sideburns and light stubble. And I repeat to him, "Please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead." Over and over, pleading with him. He then turns his head to me suddenly, but in a twisted unnatural way, so that it looks as though he is turning on a broken neck, and says, “No one is ever really dead, are they?”

And I jump up and run away through the house, admonishing myself to “Snap out of it, snap out of it!,” and I wake up.

Why tell you this? Knowing so well that listening to another’s dream is so rarely engaging. Well, yesterday, I did find out that a friend of mine had used again. Heroin. I was talking to someone very close to him. He’s alive, and apparently back on the road of recovery, but … She said in a thick voice, People die from shooting heroin. And well I, and many folks I know, know.

I believe, were I to analyze my own dream, that finding this out yesterday, about someone who had been so strong in recovery for about as long as me, that it struck me again about my friend Aaron's death. Sometimes I think about it, and get all mad at the universe again. Sometimes I think about it, and just get sad. I think the gun that my friend in the dream was being allowed to keep is the same gun all of us hold who are abstaining daily from using again. We all have the option to pick that up again. No stern admonishments or reality checks will take that option away. But, for me, I think that’s precisely what this dream was to me too – a reality check, and a warning. Just a reminder, more like. To stick close to the things that work; closer to the people whom I love.

Part of what has occurred as the result of all my job searching is that I’ve come to realize that I really do want to return to the East Coast. My family all lives there, and I’ve arrived, finally, at a place where I feel able to have emotional distance or boundaries with my family, without needing to have the physical distance.

Coming to realize that to the best of their ability, my family is just who they are. For better or worse, for whatever the past held, they are my family, and wacked as sometimes the demonstrations are, they love me.

A friend chided when I said I was thinking of moving back east, There are SO many better places than New Jersey! And while that may be true, it’s the place that is closest to my family. Though my dad and his fiancé will move to Florida within the year. My brother likely to move to Baltimore with his girlfriend, and my Mom in manhattan. Worried as she is about early-onset Alzheimer’s that likely her stringent diet of neurosis and anxiety will keep firmly locked out, a coat of armor that nothing can penetrate, the truth is too that she is getting older and there are things that I’d still like to share with her.

I called her about a month ago, upset about the lack of progress in securing myself a job, and she began to list to me resources and things I should look into, websites, and this and that. And, before she could get too far into a monologue of “not what I called you about,” I was able to stop her. I said that I knew how to search for a job, that I was calling her not for advice, but for comfort.

To her credit, she was able to hear me; she paused, said of course, and began to simply give me words of comfort and support and encouragement. To both of our credit, we are forging a new relationship in which being able to ask for what I need is becoming easier, and she’s getting better at hearing me and offering it.

I haven’t lived near my family since I graduated college (a year late) in 2004. I moved to Korea for two years to teach English, and upon returning home, near-immediately moved to San Francisco.

I’ve run from them for a long time. I’ve done a lot of work since I’ve been here, and there is forming a desire to be closer to them as they are, not as who I wish they were. They’ll always be who they are, crazy-making at times, disappointing or hurtful at times, certifiably unhinged at times. But I’m feeling more ready to be there for that too, because of the rest of the benefits of who they are.

Something that yesterday’s information underlined was the tenuous nature of life. Another friend of mine, her mother had a stroke during their family reunion last week, which my friend had refused to attend out of resentment against her mother. Ironically(?), due to this emergency, she had to go to Michigan, and join her family. To be with them. I don’t want that. I don’t want the occasions when I see my family to be as infrequent as they are. Or based on emergency.

So, with today’s reminder of the thin veil between here and not, the memory so strong of my friend who died, and the intention to secure employment so that I might save enough to move home, I’ll go out from here today, and try, however falteringly, to be open to the love that remains from both sides of that veil.