Craig and I and Justine and Ollie have spent quite a bit of time in here this past week reading, working puzzles, chatting. Craig just left with the kids to take them back to their home with Kassidy. I feel adrift. When they are here Taylor Swift is calling the tunes along with many other artists that I don't recognize. The volume is fairly high and the beat is strong. (Of course, when I play Neil Diamond, I get the volume pretty cranked.) The house feels "alive."
Its the first day of the new year. I feel adrift with the kids gone, with Ted not here to share my feelings. Last night I went to a lovely gathering of friends and acquaintances at longtime friends of ours in their gorgeous home. The house is right out of Architectural Digest and filled with beautiful, tasteful art and decor. The ambience is terrific. But I felt adrift there too. And still feel a residual today. I sat "alone" by a beautiful fireplace much of my time there. Not that there weren't people around, but I wasn't drawn to them. Every time I got up to try to be more engaged with people, I ended up going back to where I had been sitting. Does "alone in a crowd" sound familiar? The host and hostess couldn't have been more loving and welcoming. When one is adrift, sometimes it is hard to "catch" them.
Adrift seems like a very gentle word and for me implies a very gentle sensation: Like floating. Like meandering. Like browsing. Like drowsing. Like doodling. Like strolling. Like wading. Feeling adrift isn't exactly unpleasant, but, at times, feels on the brink of being cast adrift. Adrift into emptiness, loneliness, space, darkness, aloneness. To be cast adrift is not pleasant: it is frightening.
Once, when I was about nine years old, I learned that my father had had a mild heart attack. I was very much a child then. I loved to draw and play and tell stories to the younger kids. I did a lot of drifting and dreaming. One of my favorite spots to sit and look out at a lovely view of our city was on the "landing" at the top of the stairs to the second floor of our house. I would sit on the three steps that took you from the landing to the open foyer that led to the bedrooms and gaze out the tall window. I was feeling frightened by the news about my father. For the first time, I became aware that my parents would leave me some day. Thats what it meant to die. My mind continued meandering through this thought. Suddenly (thats what it felt like) a powerful force seemed to knock me into blackness, into space. The reality that I, too would die, hit like a lightening bolt and was felt as a physical blow and I could "see" myself drifting in nothingness.
I was flailing around in space with nothing to hold on to, nothing to see, nothing reaching out to me. I had been cast adrift. For many years to follow, this image of "death" was like a truth to me. This is what I could expect when I die. Because my imagination had created this, it was very "real" and therefore very "true." And I was terrified. I don't recall telling anyone. I felt self-conscious and embarrassed and devastated.
Interesting: feeling adrift is not the same frightening experience. But not altogether comfortable either. Writing today almost felt compelling. A way to dissipate the uncomfortableness, the almost sense of desperation. The sadness. The sense of isolation. I long to be rescued from this sense of being invisible. At least the writing is like a mirror: I can look, really look deeply, at myself and "see" me. And there becomes more a lazy sense of being adrift and relaxing into the current, taking in my surroundings, sighing. Feeling less desperate and afraid; more trusting in my future. Still at loose ends but more willing to "go with the flow."
