I'm watching my dog run in her sleep. Her front paws are bending at the joint, flopping up and down and up and down and her hindquarters are kind of twitching. She must be dreaming. Dreaming about running after squirrels or maybe about chasing the mangy neighborhood pitbull out of our yard. She hates it when he comes too close to me though I can tell by the way he acts that he's harmless.
I have a horrible headache from the cold I have. Terrible coughing has kept me up and I want to sleep but am distracted by the dog running in her sleep and the white christmas tree that stays lit all night across from my bed.
I'm assistant directing Annie this year and was digging through some old boxes of pictures tonight trying to find an old pic of me playing the Little Orphan to post on here. I didn't find it, but what I did discover was lots of old pictures and people I had forgotten about. Well, perhaps not people that I forgot, but feelings I definitely had forgotten.
I found a picture I must have taken of Lauren and Jake, Mom, Dad and Elizabeth from probably eight or nine years ago. Everyone looks happy and Lauren and Jake look perfect together. "Look what you had," I wanted to scream at the picture. But my head was already throbbing too much for a yelling match tonight. Then I found the picture of me and Jeremy at Lauren's wedding. We both look handsome and his head is cocked slightly towards me in an affectionate sort of way. I loved him. I'd forgotten what that felt like. But I remembered when I saw the picture.
It's been a long time since I was in love... six years I think.
Then I started thinking... what do I do with these pictures? And sure enough, there they were... Christmases, birthdays, graduations, the Dribbs and the boys... Jake and Jeremy. And I'm sure if I'd gone back further I would have found David too. What do I do with all these pictures? Throw them out? Throw away all the family pictures from certain years because they have men in them that we're not with now? Do scrapbook years 1999-2005 just get left out of the books? Out of the picture frames? How does that work?
And will it hurt Elizabeth's current boyfriend (that she's just sure she's going to marry) if at Christmas I ask him to take our family's portrait and not be in it? I remember when i returned from Italy I insisted that David take my family's picture at the airport and knowing that then he would not be in it himself (having just cheated on me with some freshman). I remember how angry my parents were that I had done that and how rude they thought i was being toward him. But it's a great picture now. It's a keeper. Cause he's not in it. In addition, there's one picture of my family minus Jake from Amy's wedding day. I'm not sure why he's not in it and at the time I remember thinking, "Where's Jake?" but we took the picture anyway. I have it framed still. We all look so beautiful and it really was a happy time for all of us.
I don't mean to dwell on the past. Like I said, I was looking for a picture so as to write a cute blog about me directing what I was once in, and what age I was when I learned to smoke my first cigar (it really is a great picture). And there it was: the past. All those feelings of awkwardness during those teenage years, finally getting pretty in college, feeling proud and grown up with the first adult love relationship I had and how I thought surely we would get married. Seeing pictures of my family with my "brother" who un-brotherified himself when he left my sister and their three year marriage. I miss him. It's true. I miss Jeremy too.
But maybe not. Maybe I just miss the feelings of love toward a brother and love toward a lover. They'll probably come back again with another brother and another lover in some space or time near or far from where I am now, but then again, maybe not. One never knows.
And besides, this cold may do me in. The coughing is driving me crazy. Funny how wherever I am sick, it's the worst feeling ever. A sore throat is the worst illness to get, the most excruciating pain ...until next time when I have the stomach flu and throwing up is the worst possible thing to experience when one is sick... until the next time when I have an earache and it's... you get the picture.
Maybe looking at old pictures and feeling these things is kind of like my dog running in her sleep. It seems vivid, it feels real, but those feelings are just shadows of the real experiences which are now a thing in the past, untangible in itself. And so reinvesting in those pictures is a similar thing - my paw may be pawing, my heart may be throbbing, but it isn't the true feeling of love; it isn't actually running.
It isn't actually loving. You can't fulfill love with a picture and you can't get love by living in the past. The only service we do to our dreams is to wake up and start to live them out in the present, toward the future.
Running isn't really running if you're laying down.
So the pictures are going back in the box and back under the bed. And having written all this, I'm not sure I've made any conclusions about what to do with them. But I know what to do with myself. Live in the moment. Wait for love. And give away love any chance I can get.
And... maybe ask my sister's boyfriend to take my family's picture this Christmas.
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