The Rules of Beyond, or, the Large, Visible Dip in Between the Neck and the Two Collarbones

I'm sitting outside in the sun in some of the lushest, greenest grass I have been in in years.  There are fat, bright yellow dandelions spattered throughout the grass.  Besides my laptop (here's to hoping that the battery lasts...) I have a water bottle filled with cold(ish) water, an 8oz thermos filled with very cold coffee, and a banana.

Let no one tell you that I am unable to "rough it in the outdoors".

Part I.

Last week I was telling my friend Joey about a book I read a few years ago that oddly changed my life.  It's not that it is incredible, necessarily, but the timing and particular content was both exciting and very needed at the time. (It also includes an interview with a young Angela Lansbury).

I had been standing in a long line at a burrito joint reading a book while waiting, and a man turned around and asked me what I was reading. (At the time: Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman). Unsure if he was just making fun of me, I told him. When I realized he was genuinely interested, I told him more. Then, I asked him what he was reading and if there was something he would recommend.  He became sheepish and admitted that, as he was a business major, he had been reading very dry books he wouldn't recommend.  There was a pause, and then his face lit up. "No, wait", he said.  "There is a book that you *have* to read.  It will seem a bit dated in some ways, as it was written in the 1940s, but I swear you should read it."  He told me that the name of the book was The Magic of Believing by Claude Bristol. He told me to ignore the covers of the book as so many of the newer editions were like neon flashes of business and barf, but to read it anyway. There was something to take away from it.

Being a sucker for the tried and true practice of following up with coincidences (life is but a Choose Your Own Adventure, is it not? We may as well make this shit interesting.  I promise you that it always is...), I left with my burrito and immediately requested the book from my library.

Part II.

I've been thinking a lot about ghosts, today.  Wondering if there is an amount of time someone must be dead before they can come and hang out with you/contact you/communicate with you.  I know that usually, if the death was very sudden, ghosts can hang out for the first month or so and infiltrate the fuck out of your dreams.  Then they come back later, although they tend to sprinkle winks to you here and there in the forms of random coincidences or pulling people into you life in a way that seems illogical.

But I've been wondering if there is a rubric of sorts that maps out who gets to come back, how, and when, exactly.

Last night Chaya visited me for the first time since the month after she died. Needless to say, it involved me sitting on stage at a Cardi B concert in which Mary J Blige was making a significant guest appearance.  But that wasn't the heart of it.

Let me separate out what happened in the dream, and what happened in real life.

In the dream, my friend Patty had been arguing with a new friend of hers about the television version of The Handmaid's Tale.  She wanted to know if it did the novel justice.  She knew that it had been an influential/memorable novel that I read when I was 19 or 20 and she had come to me to settle the argument.  The problem, however, was that I do not watch the television version of it.

Somehow, during this argument, I realized that we were in the apartment of an 80-some-year-old artist that lived in the apartment building of a person I dated about 4 years ago. The argument somehow made a letter fall out of a book that was for me (very Chaya).  Patty brought the letter to my attention and I started to read it, trying to figure out how it was Chaya knew that I would be here, and that the argument would unearth this letter and find me. The letter told me of a fortune she had for me.  Although it was discussing  money, I could tell by her handwriting that she meant something deeper than that.  A symbolic fortune.  Insight from the other side that I wasn't able to see from where I was standing.

I'll spare you the rest of the details of the dream. In short:  It involved a small handful of people I have dated (Three to be exact.  Of course three.  It is the trinity that is involved in this type of communication). One was implied (via the apartment building), one was running around trying to take care of things and keep them calm (he does this) and one was somewhere just out of reach trying to conjure and make peace with her own ghosts.

In the dream, I was aware that Chaya was around me. Trying to communicate something to me.  Trying to tell me about the fortune of art and information that she wanted to share with me.

I kept thinking, "I believe that this is real. But is this real? Is it Chaya, and, if it is, what is it that she wants me to know?"

I believed.

I wanted to believe. 

I continued to walk about the apartment in the dream and started going through the things of the old man who lived there in order to find clues.

Part III.

When I woke up, I was completely disoriented.  It felt as if I had been under the earth for hours and had just been dropped, from the sky, into the mattress I found myself in. Coming back into consciousness, I tried to piece together where I was.  I moved my eyes around to take in the room that I found myself in.

Wood floors.

White walls.

Dried flowers.

I stood up to get out of bed.

In the first step I took, I stumbled and fell forward.

I caught myself in the last second of the fall on a crate of records I hadn't noticed in the corner.

My heart pounded from the almost disaster. I caught my breath and started to push myself up from the crate. As I did, my eyes focused on the singular, random book that was laying across the tops of the records. I paused, with the print of the book just a few inches from my nose. My breath still quick, I took in the cover of the book that read

The Magic of Believing.



be well; be loved,


k.


(photo by Man Ray, Dora Maar, 1936)