Thinking about Eternity

I've been thinking about eternity lately, reading a book on the history of beliefs about the afterlife and approaching the anniversary of a dear friend's death. I feel like I should be seeing signs and having important dreams where she shares insights and tells me about her whereabouts. Instead, I dream about dancing.

"You begin too stiff," the dream teacher tells me. "but then you get better.  All in all, you're entirely too high strung."   I suppose I am, in some ways, though other parts of me feel saggy and dissonant or just plain snapped.  I come from a lineage of high-strung people.  My great-grandfather played violin in Johann Strauss' orchestra.  He was Czech and hated Germans, I'm told, and brought a tightly-wound sensibility to his family that lingers on, though none of us are musicians in the true sense--the true sense being people who make music, I suppose.  I'm not exactly sure what a true sense is, except a phrase that my mind grabbed out of the air and now wants to hang on to, a way of avoiding what is.

In the dream I am dancing, and dancing is nice, though dancing is one word I try never to use in writing. Everything is always 'dancing this' and 'dancing that', a smile dancing on her face, a snowflake dancing in the wind, and yet I have always found a certain amount of awkwardness in dancing--performance anxiety and muscle cramps, and the horror of partnership--choosing a partner, wondering if he is enjoying the dance or just politely enduring.  My boyfriends never would agree to dancing, though I often proposed it, because alone in the cocoon of my home I enjoy moving, flailing, swaying, and swooping bird-like to music.

Sometimes I hear music in the repetition of the fan blades in summer or in the percussive knockings of the radiator. If I knew how to score it I'd write a suite for oboe and clarinet, plaintive and lonesome.  Something that captures the last journey of a beech leaf to the ground or whitewashed sycamore bark exposed and naked. A piece that calls into the bardo and makes the dead prick up their ears.  Call me on the dream phone, dear friend, and tell me where you've gone and where I'm headed, like Jacob Marley rattling his chains,  "Beware."

It's a symptom of the season.  Things stripped bare, the ground covered with yesterday, the white bark rebuking, "why didn't you notice me before?" What's true demands that I look at it, and I do.  I wish that I could finish this sentence, but the end of things is always just around the corner, out of reach, where it's dark and full of ghosts.