Strange Days

I had a nightmare last night - a recurring dream where I see the horror of animals suffering in the slaughterhouse. They're always different, but cover the same theme. I don't understand what brings them on. Last night I dreamed I was able to see into the courtyard of the slaughterhouse, where a tiny veal calf was being made to bathe in a pit that was far too deep, while two guards stood on the lip of the pit, and waited. The calf struggled to keep its nose above the surface, trying to keep from drowning. It didn't realise it was saving itself to be killed in a more bloody style. It didn't know that it should just sink to the bottom and let the murky water fill its lungs. It clambered out of the pit, and I sobbed at its spindly legs, its narrow hips. The two guards led the animal away, into the slaughterhouse. They seemed almost kind as they helped it walk over the slippery ground to its death. Somehow, I had a sense that this was a kind of rape scene.

I'm filled with contradictory emotions these days. Excited about my big move - busy with making hopeful calls to apartments for rent, and going over my list of other calls I need to make in order to get things started over there and bring things to a close over here. I go to the liquour store often, to collect boxes that I bring home and immediately fill with my things. My apartment looks less like home now, and more like a place in transition - a temporary suite to sleep among all my packed belongings. I'm eating up the food I've stored in my freezer, and refusing to replenish my stores in the cupboards. I'm pouring over my math books, trying to get it done by the end of the month. I sit on the floor with my legs around a small footstool, and here I do my math. It's also the place where I have always taken my meals, since I have no chair for my table. From this vantage point, I can see out my porch window and watch people passing below. I gaze at them while I'm trying to figure out how to round numbers, or how to divide fractions, or when I'm eating my dinner made with odds and ends from my dwindling supplies.

At the beginning of summer when I attempted to learn math without any help from the college, I noticed a strange tendency to see numbers that are not actually on the page. I see a 'five' where there is actually a 'one', and write it down, unaware that I've written the wrong thing. I cover pages with figuring and come laboriously to my result, only to see that it's wrong. Yet I don't recognise until I've gone over it several times, that I've written the wrong number. It's a kind of dyslexia or something, I don't know, I often experience the same thing with written words. I do it even while I'm reminding myself not to. Even as I press my fingertip on the correct number, and read it aloud, I write in a number completely different. I'm not sure if I had this trouble in highschool. Maybe I did, and this is why I did so poorly on tests. I never noticed it then. Never caught the mistakes. Now I'm more diligent. and catch myself doing it all the time. It's frustrating because I don't know how to fix the problem. I often don't realise I've done it again, until I've spent a long period of time in trying to understand why I can't seem to reach the correct result. In my desperation to figure out why I keep arriving at the wrong answer, I read my figures outloud, and often I realise only after several tries, that I've been reading the correct number - seeing the correct number as though it was written there, yet I'm actually looking at a completely different number that I've erroniously written down. I'll read "seven" again and again, because that is what I see, yet I've written a five. I don't see that it's a five. My brain is playing tricks on me. Still, despite this trouble, I'm getting it all done. I've finished the first book now, and will begin the second of three, tomorrow.

Nibbling around the edges of my excitement is sadness as I end this chapter in my life. This little apartment where I learned so much about myself. Where my cat spent her final days, and my goldfish. This neighbourhood with all its intruding sounds of nightly screams and loud music, the murmuring of my neighbour as she sits each evening on her porch with a man she obviously loves. And I'm struggling through a personal loss that I don't understand. Something that leaves me so baffled I don't know how or what to feel about it. I don't even know if the loss is permanent. And I don't understand how it came about.

I feel anger as well, when I think about this loss. I'm trying to keep it from growing. At the same time I want to feel it completely, because I know that unexpressed anger gives way to depression. I fear depression with all my heart. I desperately do not want to sink into it, as I've been known to do with such totality it becomes a living death.

Adding to this, is the fact that I'm again being left off the schedule at work. For the second week in a row, I have not one shift. Yet they call me in, spur of the moment, asking me to show up in five minutes because they've found themselves short of hands. I don't let on that I'm irritated by this, because I need the money. I rush right over, as they surely knew I would, dropping my plans to attend my photography club, putting off anything that needed doing in order to help those who don't care at all that they've put me in this bind. As I work, I'm often told that they appreciate my effort "Boy it's nice to be caught up for a change!" they say "Wow you work fast!" And yet I get no shifts. And when I pick up my tip packet that everyone receives every other week, there's a note on it for me, "this money is to ensure that you give us good service". As though I need a reminder. No one else gets a message like this. Today I spoke with the guy who writes the schedule, and asked him to make sure I have some shifts next week. "I didn't get any for two weeks in a row." I reminded him. He grinned right in my face and said "I know!" as though it's fun for him to keep me jumping through hoops for no reward. Today I asked to take a ten minute break, and was snapped at for "being a slacker". I've asked at least six people, including my boss, what I'm doing wrong, and am told I'm a great worker, and there's nothing for me to change. Obviously I'm missing something, but what?