Overslept

I overslept again, which I know because I woke the first time before the sun and stayed in bed. Drifted back into wonderland where three men in my life collided in a frantic attempt to get back from India and settled into a place that was full of secret passageways and did not feel like home.

This is the language my body uses to tell me – with greater certainty – that it is time to get up. That laying in among the sheets is a recipe for getting lost in the gnarled and dark passageways of my mental illness. That I'll wake tangled in sheets and grief, both hot and cold, wondering where the easy nights of sleep and youth have gone.

The Universe it seems is cashing in on the nights I powered through, the tempestuous spending of the trust fund of my energy. Many of these expenditures were indulgences in love and full moon walks on the beach, others binge-watching Dexter and horror stories.

Rather than bounding out of bed, I kept score, weighing myself with the communications that came in during the night – and those that did not. I feel like the coastline of California – first ravaged by fire and then drowned by the storms that we prayed for, that always seem to come a week late.

The rain is so fast and so soon after the fire that it changes the very shape of the earth, tearing away what was once a piece of the massive part of gravity that keeps us from floating off into space.

How is this possible?

I cried a lot last year – many sleepless nights spent burried in the misery of my past, unpacking one memory at a time. Tears that came years too late, after the burned out soil had hardnened over and was no longer able to accept the healing of the waters. But somehow, something softened me, just a little, just at the edges, near the roots.

Rain in the desert runs off and away, and only soaks in when it finds a safe place to land and rest.

I would like to be a safe place to rest.

In Search of Water.