02.28.05 - 5:44 p.m.

Last night I dreamt that Brian and I were still writing to each other - writing physical letters, real letters, with pen and ink and paper, the sound of the nib scritching against the grain of the paper. I wrote to him in September. He responded to me in December. And I was trying to decide if it was too late to write him back now. Saturday, particularly, felt like it was practically March, even the lingering remnants of my flu (I was actually still in bad shape on Saturday) kept me grounded in February.

After a week at home, on the couch, I had plenty to do - although not much to buy. Despite my delirious conviction while laying in provisions Tuesday morning that it would be easy to whip up a great spinach-leek-cilantro soup and that I would want and need to cook at least that much, it was not to be. I wasn't interested in peeling a banana, let alone chopping a leek or opening a bag of pre-washed spinach (I love bags of pre-washed spinach), so I lived on popsicles, canned soup, more popsicles (they were good for my throat, which was so raw that even lukewarm soupbroth (hel-lo sodium) burned on the way down - even the Healthy Choice soups, which are allegedly lower in sodium than, uh, the other stuff. They weren't very good, though - and not because they were skimping on the fat or salt, but because they were skimping on the ingredients.

I thought that Progresso had the best of the canned soups. Mmmmm. Their tomato soup was ridiculously awesome, though I had that this weekend - after my fever broke, when I was feeling at least semi-human again and had emerged from the weird daytime cable landscape populated by annuity brokers, accident lawyers, and fourth-rate diploma mills (what on earth does a degree in "homeland security" enable one to do? How pathetic and weird and creepy and sad is it that weird-o fourth-rate diploma mills think to advertise such a degree as one of their offerings? Even better: the electronics industry is HEATING UP. Come let us train you to install televisions in people's cars and stuff!), and baby mommas and baby daddys suing each other over ownership of the Rent-A-Center (tm) bedroom suite or the two thousand dollar cell phone bill.

Saturday was bright and sunny, and I finally got around to sorting and paying bills, cleaning my living space (the cats had a field day, scattering bits of paper and plastic bags and advertisements and magazines and kleenex and receipts and bits of recipes or boxtops or "US Post Office Will Not Deliver Without Postage"-style return envelopes everywhere last week, when I had the energy neither to scold them nor to pick up after them), sorting through the contents of the fridge, watering the plants (and, uh, throwing out the two that died during my week-long semi-strike - er, illness), gathering laundry, putting away the crazy, ugly, cheap shoes I keep purchasing uh, apparently, whenever I leave the house (favorites: the weird $0.99 silver-glitter house shoes. I still covet the lucite heels that light up as you walk. Talk about hooker-shoes, and at a hooker-friendly price too! Still, I won't spend more than $5.00 for shoes that I will emphatically not wear anywhere except at home to amuse my own self, so I'm not likely to get light-up lucite hooker heels anytime soon unless then go on sale), and shopping - more shoppping. Honestly, I just needed a few things - like a phone for upstairs - and a few groceries, but it was such a gorgeous, sunny day - almost warm - that I gave myself internal permission to check out the seeds and patio furniture and then, when I saw my lime-sorbet handbag, well, I gave in to that impulse, too.

I love it. We watched [i]Igby Goes Down[/i] Saturday night, but I couldn't keep my eyes off the creamy green leather of my handbag. It's so bright and perfect and pretty, and it makes me feel prettier when I'm holding it, or when it's sitting around - tossed pseudo-casually across the "coat-rack" chair, or whatever - just being its sweet lime sorbet self. Sorbet? Actually, sorbet is too icy, too cold to describe my delicious new bag. It's more gelato than sorbet, softer but bright and lovely and modern. I want a suit that color, but I suspect that I would look like a popsicle rather than a person.

So, I dreamt about Brian, and I dreamt that the Wal-Mart at the mall - with its wrap-around retaining wall holding back the hillside the way a leather belt with an oversized Nascar-themed buckle strains to hold back some redneck beer gut - wasn't doing any business at all and was going to close as a consequence. It was important to me for some reason - the fate of the Wal-Mart at the mall, even though I've never been (and refuse to go and only considered going once, when I read that sugar-free Philly-Swirl Italian Water-Ice popsicles were on sale at Wal-Marts and Sam's Clubs and wanted to try them. I still want to try the sugar-free Philly-Swirl Italian water-Ice popsicles because that would be awesome, but not enough to go to the Wal-Mart at the mall), I was confused and concerned. Maybe the building was already empty and I was imagining what might happen to an empty Wal-Mart, and how that changed contour of the hillside was a permanent alteration, while every single cheap consumer good (of emphatically Chinese manufacture, where prison labor can be had for pennies an hour, or perhaps even a day) purchased atop that monstrousity of earth-moving was utterly temporary, consumeable, throw-away.

So I had two nonsensical dreams about loss, and one far-too-sensical dream about loss, for the third dream or shard of a dream that was still swimming through my conscious mind when I awoke this morning to find Guinevere sitting on my chest and sniffing my mouth and nose, was too close to home. In the dream, I was supposed to have surgery on my foot. For some reason, I didn't have the surgery, but was trying to fool my parents into believing that I had had the surgery. I was trying to limp appropriately, but my gait was all wrong, I was too nonchalant, or the lurching swing of my movement was too exagerrated, or I was limping on the wrong damn foot. They didn't notice, though, because we were all going together back to Philly to see Susie and we were in a hurry because she was more ill than she has been lately - something had changed - or maybe she was going to have surgery, and I was reconsidering whether or not to put Galahad (who was huge, now, with the pushed in face of a Persian) in the kennel when he escaped the keeper (who looked suspiciously like Ingeborg, complete with the trademark bob) and squirmed around her feet into the yard.

But then my parents told me that Susie was dead, and it wasn't the cancer, they said, but her heart during the surgery, which just gave out, and I awoke with that fear, that thread of incipient grief, like ash in my mouth, prickling awareness just beneath my skin because I tried to call her all weekend and couldn't get through, but maybe I didn't try enough, and I didn't try enough and it was [i]too late[/i].

So, I have to call Susie tonight, even if there's nothing new, because it's there and what else can I do? You don't change when you get sick. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble someone, it simply happens. It's out there, and it happens, and it doesn't - nor does it have to - make sense, and I absolutely hate that there is nothing to do except what we've done, so far, and what we'll keep doing, and the platitudes we will mouth, and the books about cancer survivors, and the awful pink ribbons that seem to have attached themselves to the ass-ends of everyone and their brother's SUVs, a spot of drag-queen color among the patriotic forests of yellow and redwhitenblue and camoflage and "Never Forget" stickers that mean, incidentally, now that you have this awesome sticker/magnet stuck on your car, attesting to your moral, emotional, and intellectual superiority to anyone who doesn't have a similar sticker/magnet/paint job, you can feel free to forget.

Recurrent breast cancer is better than anything else she could've had, way back when all this started (hello, lung cancer, hello, debilitating COPD, congestive heart failure), but - ten years out, after all that intensive therapy - the surgery, the chemo, the radiation, the five years of Tamoxifan, and so on - it's not fucking good, and it's not fucking good news for Karen or for mom, who has the "average time to recurrence" for ovarian cancer and the five-year survival rate stuck in her head, and was more depressed about her own cancer than she had been at anytime since, I don't know, her last endless hospitalization, but I still - god, I hate this, I fucking hate this, I hate this. I could be happy if the world didn't necessarily end for us, for each of us, and just like this - painfully, one by one.