I freaked out when I woke up. I couldn’t tell whether or not I had killed someone.
The dream that woke me had saturated my mind with guilt and fear. I struggled in the darkness to remember whether or not I had shot a mailman and covered it up for years. I could remember pulling the trigger. That couldn’t be right, but I remembered doing it and felt remorse.
Trying to get back to sleep proved futile, so I got out of bed and shuffled into the living room where my wife was still awake, sewing. I sat on the couch and watched her work. I wasn’t sure whether I should tell her. Even then, in my wakeful state, I wasn’t sure whether the dream were true. It still felt like a true memory. I didn’t want to confess to a crime that would put me in prison if I wasn’t sure it was just a dream.
I decided that I could confide in her. She listened without showing any sign that what I said disturbed her. She showed more faith in my innocence than I felt. She didn’t seem to appreciate my struggle to find a handhold on reality, but her aplomb calmed my mind a little.
The overwhelming remorse for buried secrets felt palpable and real. For all I could tell, I had committed the crime and had evaded detection for years. I thought maybe I had been suppressing the memory, and my dreams had brought it to my conscious awareness.
My wife finished her sewing, and we went to bed together.
I only felt secure in my innocence when I woke up in the morning, though even now traces of doubt flit across my mind. Imagination and memory cannot be fully trusted.
I’ve given up trying to be discriminating about who I friend on Facebook. I’m tired of deciding whether or not I can really call someone my friend. Am I the only one who struggles with the implied intimacy of “friend”?
My new standard is if someone took the time to make an overture to me and I can remember who they are, I’ll friend them. That’s what it means to be my friend on Facebook. And I think that’s cool enough.
Right now, I’m in a room where the men are outnumbered 5 to 1. This is a common occurrence in the world of higher ed. I once ended up in the back of a limo with eight women on a business trip. That sounds much more fun than it was.
I can’t go back inside that box. It frightens and stifles and suffocates. Not for your love will I return. I mourn because we cannot be together wholly, callow fantasy, two minds made one. Alone we spend our time together and die.
There is a primal urge in me that hungers to belong, take a label as a badge of confraternity, and feel safe in the harbor of settled thoughts. Or I could set out for the landless horizon letting the to and fro of truth lead me along, unburdened by the ballast of labels.
I father children. I marry wives. I walk in the sunlight. I rest in the shade. I study the words of Buddha. I hear stories of Shiva. I doubt the gods. I cherish life. I fear death. But what am I?
In conversation I may apply labels—husband, father, Buddhist, atheist, Thelemite—to aid comprehension. But inwardly, to myself, I hold back. I hesitate at the head of that path. Some wiser part of me knows that deception is the fate of those who follow there.
What am I? By lack of definition, I am everything, a being of great immensity, without beginning of days or end of years. I reign from the rivers to the ends of the earth. If anything is sacred, I am sacred. Petty labels have no power to contain me. Only fools fall for that old trick.