j'ai mal pour les shadows aussi

one of the first phrases i learned in french was in the back of an old, useless phrase book: "j'ai mal par tout." i hurt everywhere.

i hurt all the way down to my fingernails. i know that tomorrow i'll have to get up and do this all over again, so i'm lying on my couch in near-darkness, book on my chest, no music, no tv, no loud neighbors, no traffic sounds. the thoughts in my head are jumbled and only partially exposed at once, like laundry tumbling over itself.

when i was 13 or 14 years old, i read a ray bradbury short story that i still haven't recovered from. it's called "there will come soft rains (august 2026)", and describes my perfect idea of hell. a community is wiped out by nuclear war, but the robots that helped run the houses are still puttering around apathetically. i read this alone in the middle of winter, and i still remember where i was sitting and what i was wearing when i began to read about the shadows that clung to houses and the sides of buildings after hiroshima. bradbury described the silhouettes of two children playing catch that had been affixed to the side of their house, and when i ran crying to my dad, he explained how the science worked behind the flash-moment of the bomb: the sunlight, the objects, the shadows, the split-second of absolute destruction. i cried over that short story for the rest of the night, and i remember my dad sitting on the foot of my bed at one point, just patting my feet through the covers.
(it's funny how that kind of thing stays with you-- whenever things truly fall apart, the last thing i think at night is how nice it would be if someone was sitting at the foot of my bed to protect me from the chaos and the evil out in the world).

bradbury's point was that radiation and violence was making the planet sterile and unable to reproduce... and because this story had a deep impact on my developing understanding of biology and war, i'm finding myself struggling as an adult to understand how radiation can save lives by slowly killing just part of one's living self.
ray bradbury, kurt vonnegut and harlan ellison are three of the most heart-breaking writers i've ever come across. there's something about sarcasm and minimalism that lends itself to truly terrifying war commentary.

two of my family members are suddenly dying of cancer-- my cousin's dad; a quietly funny, soft-spoken, thoughtful man, and my mom's cousin, one of the kindest women i've ever met. i feel so bad for my aunt and my cousin stewart-- i keep thinking about how long the days must feel to them right now, and all the thoughts that must be going through their heads.

this is a little bit creepy, but given the limits of my imagination (and the history of my lurid horror-story-hearing background), not altogether surprising.
over the summer, and continuing into the precipice of fall, i've had insomnia, sleeplessness, and- for the first time in my life- dreams that were so close to the surface that i haven't been able to decipher what i dreamed, and what really happened. i asked my co-worker about "her famous black comedian uncle," i chided my friend for not remembering to give back my high school yearbook, i consoled another friend over the loss of a job that he'd never heard of. but more disturbing than the loss of sleep has been the visitor who appears just as i'm beginning to drift off.

i won't go into the night that i honestly thought i had a ghost, but that's when it started. just as i start to doze off and enter the blissful land of slumber, i catch a shadow out of the corner of my eye. out of the corner of my imagination, at least,and possibly out of my ray bradbury memory banks. it's just a half-blurred image of a tall man leaning in the doorway to my bedroom from my bathroom, wearing shadow-colored pants and a nice-fitting shadow-colored sweater. sometimes i can even tell that he's got a watch band on. he has ken-style hair and no face.

i haven't completely lost my mind, nor lost a small chunk, but my mind has gotten very tired from a few nagging things in my life, and i have reached the point of not being able to disconnect nightmare from wakefulness. it is the weirdest thing in the world to wake up just enough to pull the covers over my shoulders and to think, "he's not really there, keep sleeping" or "maybe i'll get an imaginary girl to distract my imaginary man." this game my mind has made up is a small attempt to torture myself... but i managed to get up at 4am last night and ball up a bathrobe to put at the foot of my bed.
my dog used to sleep at or on my feet every night- i slept in a tiny curled-up ball for the first three years of college out of habit for her- and when i was little, my dad would sit at the same spot to read tom sawyer to me, or pat my feet to convince me that it was going to be ok, even though hiroshima and shadows existed.

this is as far as my laundry-tossed thoughts are taking me -- just a series of shadows, benign and malignant. tomorrow will not mal as par tout if i can get to sleep soon, eat breakfast, drink a cup of coffee, and go to my job, where people are captured on film using light and shadow and flexfills and apertures.