Coexisting Realities

My parents are in India. Delhi or Goa. A purple cloak of haze over the LA skyline. Smog never tires of this city. It refuses to pick up, leave, find a new home. In Connecticut, there is Autumn. Orange and red and yellow leaves crunching underfoot. This is also the case in Claremont, I learned a couple of weekends ago.

When the hubcap fell off and I had to go to the Prius dealership and pay $80 for a new one, I thought about wheels. Ashoka's wheel outside the Ashoka Hotel in Delhi where my mother and my sister and I get pastries and cold coffee and sit in jute chairs and chat after a day of shopping. The wheel of life, cycles, repetition. Knocking on doors that refuse to open. The cycle of life and death, death. Endings. Beginnings.

Cycling through guilt, reliving experiences. Does something persistently torment you, haunt you? Is this because you need it to or because like a ghost, or an apparition, it refuses to leave, it has made a home in your home?

Last week there was a ghost in my home. The fire alarm kept going off on its own. No smoke, no fire. Five times it was reset. Then an old halogen lamp, broken for weeks sitting in a corner decided to turn itself on. How? I asked it. It was plugged in but it hadn't worked for weeks. Then in the middle of the night, the dryer turned on by itself. It wasn't scary, it just was.

What is it that I need to be told/reminded of? I asked this strange force. This electrical malfunction/strange energy in my house. I have tried to seal off the things that haunt me, but they persist, in perfect concentric cycles through my life. The cycles of the seasons, fall. What is it I need to harvest? What do I need to bury now?

And I worried because my dreams are no longer as vivid as they once were, telling me things that I couldn't have known on my own. Is this how all powers are lost? Is there kryptonite hidden somewhere in the shelves, in the bar, behind the bookshelf? When will I be me again? I asked, and by this, I meant, when will I be strong, or maybe even powerful? When will I be able to look at life really in the eye?

Sometimes I think we are all so old. So much older than we think we are, than we seem to be. Shouldn't we know better?

If you drive in circles in your own city, you notice strange things: a Diesel Mercedes rolls into an intersection, hits a wall, rolls back. There is no driver; it was left on a hill. Without the parking brake on. No one is hurt. A dog so tiny it can fit into the palm of your hand. a friend, running down Sunset, the comfort of familiarity.

I am flexible enough that I can bend and temporarily hold on to tiny realities. The deeper truths are too heavy to carry, at least at all times. I carry them a few feet, then take a break. Many breaks. There is some sort of equation to this, isn't there? Strength=Time+Practice/The Flexing of Certain Muscles. I am willful but not strong. There is a difference. This difference cleaves into the softer part of my flesh, maybe the underside of my arm, and sticks there. I feel the pain of this in cycles.