Blogs are strange. Start hunting through the fields of words and images; let yourself bounce off of suggestions and links and posts of the week and blogs of note. You can't even remember how you found this person or that, only that one door opened and others followed. And these people amaze you. These complete strangers who tell you the stories of their lives.
I've been following Lisa's blog for awhile, always dumbfounded at how cheerful she was, even when reporting on what her latest brain tumor was up to, or her tenacity to keep writing - dictating her posts when she was too weak to type. Always, always trying to finish her novel. Anyway, she died yesterday. And the blog is finished. One offshoot of a story is cut, sealed at the end the way the flame from a lighter hardens the plastic at the tip of a shoelace. The fluttering vines of her husband and children continue. At the moment, they don't know where they are, what is happening, how they got here.
Now I am off to the Royal Observatory. The sky clouds over and clears again, like that game where several people stand in a circle and make a stack of their hands, pulling one out from the bottom and dashing it to the top, faster and faster. The moon is a half a biscuit. I want to see the stars. I want to see something that will pull me out of my body and disband my senses, scatter me into the sky. Hello Lisa, I will say. Come here often?
5 comments:
You make the cynic in me lie down and my other self comes around and hopes....really hopes...that these meetings can happen.
I can think of a million things I'd love to say to my dad. But if I see him again...I won't be able to think of a single one. And it won't matter one bit.
A shared, crooked smile will say all we need.
It is good to let your cynicism nap once in awhile. I'm glad some of the things I ramble have that effect on you.
You inherited a crooked smile? Wear it with pride my friend.
Ach. The leaving is so hard, for us left behind at any rate.
I feel I know many bloggers more intimately, and care about them more, than I know and care about most of the people I know in supposedly real life.
I have no cynicism to put down for a nap, I suppose :-) But for myself I feel like the best of me is already elsewhere, in other people's hearts, and that it would be no big deal if the particular lump of tissue with my name on it died. What's so important about that?
I am coming to share your fascination with the paradox of the blog phenomenon. The fact that we can share these deep impressions with people we don't know, don't know what they look like, their mannerisms, tone of voice, might not even stand to be in the same room with them if we met them... but that doesn't matter. From the distance we can still validate each other, our expressions. It's a brave new world...
Dale: I find that I am more attached to my "lump of tissue" lately. I think this is because I feel a lingering sense that I am incomplete, that I should be doing something, namely writing something, that will free me of this fear.
Jim: I'm off to read! I'm behind by two chapters and need to catch up!
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