Today has been one of those days where no amount of meditation can save me from myself. I broke down and cried, finally, which was some kind of relief. When I don't hear from S and when I know I won't hear from him, and when there are a number soldiers killed, I worry. When I'm away from home I worry even more. I have these dark thoughts that if something were to happen to him I would find out on the internet because the military wouldn't be able to find me and they would tell his parents instead. How is it possible that I can do this to myself? Isn't it crazy?

Sometimes I'm angry at S for putting me through this, then I remind myself that the only logical conclusion to that sort of anger is for our marriage to dissolve, which is the last thing I want. My anger dissipates and I find myself sad, the root of that anger to begin with, I know. It's irrational. Yet it still is.

I've been spending a lot of time alone the past two days. Fred is still in the hospital and will be there until Monday or Tuesday, most likely, because he has colitis and his protein levels are way down. He's restless and unhappy. Tomorrow he can start to have more visitors, so I'm going to spend a couple of hours with him. He's been okay with it all until today. Now he just wants to go home. Selma spent much of the day with him and she's with him again tonight. It's so good that she's able to be there. It turns out this is the perfect time for me to be here. I took care of the errands and the house today so Selma didn't have to. I even put on a shower cap and washed the dog; she's been needing one for several months now. I'm solaced, actually, by knowing that I am making some space for the two of them, doing the little things that need to be done but are, comparatively, unimportant.

Last night I did a guided meditation from Plum Village, the "intentional community" in France run by Vietnamese zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I will do it again tonight. Sometimes I need someone to guide me. That and a good cry.

Tonight I cooked dinner for Selma and two filmmaker friends, David and Sally, who I first met down in Baja a couple of years ago over New Year's. That night we lit a bonfire on the beach and Sally told us all to write down ten things we wanted to leave behind, and to burn the lists in our own New Fire ceremony. I remember S crept up to the top of the cliff, hid in the bush, and played a plastic fish trophy Fred had brought along (the fish sang "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay"), and spoke to us from above as King Fishmouth while the rest of us burned our secret lists and, a few at least, lept across the flames in synchronicity with the waves. (S has a way of making fun of the absurdity of it all without being malicious. We laughed again tonight recalling him up in the scratchy grass, playing that battery-operated, singing trout.) I remember my list included anxiety, which was already taking over my life since we'd been trying to get pregnant for several months with no luck, and I remember that I felt better, surprisingly, for a few weeks after the burning. Tonight, though, we had no ceremonies outside of the usual wine toasts and sharing of stories. Of course, our night was splattered with talk of politics.

Sally asked me how I've been holding up since S has been gone and I told her that I don't feel like I have much of a choice in the matter except to live my life. What would I do, hide under the covers for a year? Wallow and feel sorry for myself? For what purpose? We talked about how a few people do sort of collapse when things fall apart, but I think most people don't, and not just because they have no choice (some can actually hide for a year without consequence, I assume). Imagine all of the Iraqis who right now are dealing with the same issues we are -- Selma with her husband battling cancer, me with my husband off at war, Sally's stepmother battling Alzheimer's -- but instead of sitting in a modernist livingroom on a hillside on the edge of a (relatively) peaceful city, they are surrounded by violence and uncertainty and seemingly endless suffering. Most Iraqis are living their lives, too, with no real choice either. And for them, it is politics that have caused this added suffering. I could never compare myself to them or their suffering. Mine is nothing. But I understand the helplessness that can come when politics are dictating your life, or when disease has taken control. I'm jealous, really, of friends who can leave politics behind.

I've finished reading Semezdin Mehmedinovic's Sarajevo Blues and it is brilliant. I wish it were longer. I wanted to stay with him for hundreds of pages, not just 100 or so. I can imagine how much richer the language is in his native Bosnian, though the translation by Ammiel Alcalay is wonderful. Each vignette, each poem, is alive with detail and poignancy. He doesn't need to build his prose with abstraction. The reality he lived through in Sarajevo during the siege gave enough surreality that each waking moment was a walking poem:


Yes, the poignancy of coincidence when chaos surrounds you; the improbable suddenly "normal" and the absurd perhaps more appropriate than what our pre-chaos selves could have imagined. The immediacy of Mehmedinovic's "dispatches" is palpable. We are with him through the horror. Here's another excerpt:


Tonight I received an email from my dad and found out that an older friend, J, died a year ago, though neither of us knew it until now. I knew his daughter R very well, once upon a time. We used to play hearts over the summer when I would visit my dad, and a decade later in LA we were roommates in a vintage apartment on the corner of Sunset and Barrington, a darling two-bedroom with a fountain in the courtyard and a middle-aged Russian filmmaker landlord who dreamed of making movies but instead walked the property in plastic flipflops. One Saturday he poured liquid dish soap into the fountain to clean it, leaving it to foam bubbles for weeks. R wanted to be a model. I wanted to be a filmmaker. After a couple of years we both left -- she married a surfer and moved to San Francisco; I moved back to Chicago.

R cut herself off from me when she and her husband were struggling with infertility, so by the time her mother M was diagnosed with liver cancer a couple of years ago, the only communication I had with her was through her dad, J, who was a prolific writer. Her parents were an amazing, tight couple, completely in love even after thirty years of marriage. R's mother M decided not to have any treatment -- the cancer had metastisized -- so she and J traveled the world during their last months together. After M died, I wrote J and told him how I learned what a loving marriage could be from them. They showed me how it was possible to love one another year after year. It is a shock then, but not surprising somehow, to hear J died within months of M. I could not imagine them apart. They did not make sense except together.

I don't know if I should try to contact R again now, or respect her clear desire to be left alone. I have written her several times the past two years and she's never written me back. Now I know she has been consumed with illness and death and grief. I'm sorry I wasn't there for her through it, and that I let our friendship disappear. I remember a line from a Joy Harjo poem about this kind of regret: "I'm ashamed I never had the words to carry a friend from her death to the stars correctly..."

I have more to write about. I will try again tomorrow.

(Thursday AM: My dad emailed me again this morning. The story is even more tragic that I first thought. J killed himself last fall with drugs left over from his wife's illness, in his son's home. I can't imagine what R and her brother have been going through. It's too much.)