Just thinkin'

Tonight Dan and I are going to see Idina Menzel in Boston. She's famous now but the first solo show of hers Dan and I saw was at the Regattabar in Cambridge---a famous, but really intimate jazz club inside the Charles Hotel. I didn't even really know what she looked like then, so when Dan told me as we stepped off the elevator in the hotel that we had just shared the ride with her, I was shocked and then pissed that I missed it. Though I do recall that I was a little drunk---we had just finished a bottle of wine on the back deck of a little Italian restaurant near the hotel--and I'm sure I would have embarrassed myself. Tonight's show is at the Wang Theater...I'm doubtful we'll ever share an elevator again.

It's been hard to get myself out of the apartment lately---in large part because I'm writing again, so I'm not complaining---but I am making myself go (and made myself buy the tickets) because Idina Menzel's voice is nourishment for me. The thing about music is---there's no thinking, just feeling. As a person who can muck up feelings with layers and layers of thought, music is sometimes a Lola-to-Lola (Lola-to-Laura? Laura-to-Lola? Sybil-to-Sybil?) translator. With music, my brain gets totally bypassed as the processing center and while sometimes the result is the stuff of shedding a mood to dance alone in the car, often the result is sudden, aching weeping. It's why sometimes I dodge musical entirely but also why it's sometimes the only way to get release and relief.

I'm a little nervous going into the concert tonight though---like I'm bracing to be ripped open. The last time we saw her was the spring of 2010---two months after my mom was diagnosed---and for the encore she sang "Tomorrow" from Annie and my whole body just caved in on itself as the tears roared up in an out-of-nowhere cry. Because just thinkin' about tomorrow all of a sudden felt totally terrifying. I saw that tomorrow and the tomorrow after that and those that would follow would be the tomorrows when my mom would get sicker. Would be the tomorrows that would take me to the tomorrow when she'd be gone. I could take being stuck with this day of gray and lonely forever because my mom was still alive. She sang that tomorrow was only a day away and it felt like a threat. I was overcome with panic that I couldn't stop time. I cried and thought, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, I hate you. Stay the fuck away.

The song doesn't offer any more comfort now, even as I know that the cobwebs and the sorrow of today are exactly what it promises relief from. When I listen to it now it feels like my chest muscles are straining to hold a load beyond their strength---the weight of yearning for yesterday, steeling myself for today, and fighting for the absence of fear and the cultivation of enough optimism to want tomorrow. Time feels like a betrayal now and tomorrow is a day traveled further from my mom and dad and the memories of their smallest details. Tomorrows fade the details, they already have. People look down on visiting your yesterdays, but I never feel worse than when I tell myself I shouldn't look back. That's what now feels like to me. I know I should want tomorrow---I know it's coming (it came) no matter what I want, so it would be helpful to look forward with hope. But this is the stuff of thinking versus feeling that I was talking about. What I know is moot---what I know has no power and soothes me not.

It will be a barometer of healing, this song. If listening to it ever again reminds my heart (as it used to) that time holds dreams instead of pain, well then I'll know that, wow, I'm in that tomorrow now. I've already felt whole minutes of that tomorrow, just not whole days. And maybe that's what this song will eventually mean to me---that time is no longer concrete. That yesterdays, todays and tomorrows will just always exist on top of each other from now on...come what may and come what already has.

Even in this post I've gone from feeling to thinking (hence the time-as-abstract-concept meanderings). I'm sure I'll love the concert. It will unlock me from my brain.

My dad's birthday is next month and I've been shutting my eyes when I think about, like I'm hiding from my own thought. The two-year anniversary of my mom's death will be days later. My body is re-experiencing her dying---the trauma of watching her get sicker, of not being able to protect her from her pain and fear, of knowing she was going---through the cellular memories triggered by the changing season. This used to be my favorite time of year and I am hiding from the leaves she loved---we wheeled her onto the deck to see them---and the memories carried on the changing air: her hand holding mine, our connection still tangible and resting on the lap of her cotton nightgown; hugging my crying father as we stood alone on an early fall morning and said to each other, she's gone.

And now you're gone too, Dad. And your birthday is coming up.

My body is telling me in its cute way---insomnia, conjunctivitis and a cold sore---that it's best if I just acknowledge this escalation of sorrow rather than create further sickness with my resistance. It's a time for self care and compassion and I'm trying. I began beating myself up for something yesterday and then I heard myself saying, "You're doing the best you can, you're doing the best you can, you're doing the best you can." I heard it afterwards, as if through a two-second delay and I thought, when did that voice move into the neighborhood? I ought to make her a pie.

I'm dreading the holidays. Better that I say it out loud than try to pretend I feel otherwise because I think I should or wish I could. In bed the other night I told Dan that I wish I could just wake up in January and it made him sad because he once knew a Lola who lived for this time of year.

I don't think I'll feel this forever---today just feels sad.

Tomorrow? I'm not betting my bottom dollar on sun, but I do feel grateful to have one.