Fear and Dreams

I'm still creaky. The house is messy, too.

How am I ever going to handle going back to work?

Everything seems different. The light seems harsher. I feel older. I feel like I can see through people. I feel as if I have disappeared.

I am tackling my grad school work one weary task at a time. Tick, tick, tick. My life feels so fragmented. I'm going to go out to Jay's tonight, but I don't want to. How is it that I never managed to put together an integrated home?

Through facebook, I'm back in touch with a lot of my old Dartmouth friends--and their lives all seem so whole and good. They all have spouses and pics up of them clutching small children. They make pancakes on the weekend. I work all weekend. What happened to me? Why not me? One silly choice at a time, I guess. 42. I'm not in such a bad place, but it's not exactly the place I wanted to be. And it's just going to get worse, you know. I'm going to get older, wrinklier, uglier, and my body will eventually just fall apart and die. Happens to everyone. That's such a kicker. That just sucks! One of the nurses I work with just overdosed on crack over the weekend--young, pretty. What an idiot. How terrible and sad. This sounds really dramatic--but I can feel my mortality. I can feel my creaking, future skeleton encased in my body, and it's just about unbearable.

I've been thinking about Chicago. I just finished a book, Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. It was very disturbing. All about H.H. Holmes, a serial killer, who killed between 27 and 200 people, mostly young women, right under everyone's noses. He also killed three children, the Pitezel children. Those poor children. Those stupid parents. I tried to find out what became of the children he left alive, but couldn't. I may bitch and moan about homeland security and cameras everywhere, but you know, in this day and age of cell phone signal triangulation and credit card tracking and cameras on stoplights, it would be pretty hard to just make 200 young women disappear. Vanish. You can't vanish anymore. Maybe that's a good, safe, thing. When my great grandmother and great great aunt were in Chicago around that time, they lived at the Three Arts Club on Dearborn and Goethe. Couldn't disappear there! It makes you understand why people were so insistent on cloistering their girls, why letters of introduction, family, chains of association were so important.

Reading about Chicago made me remember living there, remember living in the Three Arts Club. I had a dream about it last year, it was in ruins. I wandered through the halls, looking for familiar things, not finding any. I was trying to find the courtyard. There was a young man at a draughtsman's table, and he looked at me over his spectacles, smiled and said, "The secret to life is to have a courtyard in your soul." I woke up. I didn't think about the dream until a few days ago. Apparently, the Three Arts Club is no more. Betrayed by its board, the sanctuary Jane Addams had so carefully set up for woman artists, the sanctuary so many generations of my family have found, has been dismantled and sold. For 13 million dollars. Who profited, I wonder? How could they do that? I really don't want to get involved in this, but I feel I have to.

Well, that's my 1/2 hour.