Aftermath of Dreaming(116)
The dream feels real and the scream that accompanies it is real, so it’s hard not to believe that they both are, but right before I’m attacked, the vision vanishes and my screaming stops, and I realize it’s only the dream, but by then it doesn’t matter. I’ve had the emotions, reacted as if they were real, and the emptiness I’m left with is awful. Maybe the scream dream is trying to wake me up, but to what?
After another night on the couch of not much sleep, I am in my studio doing research on the Internet. The grief I have been in these past five weeks is not ever-present, I do get breaks when I forget my parentlessness, but most of that time, I’m thinking about Andrew, so loss seems to be the general theme. I’ve decided to embrace this state, which for my new jewelry means jet.
Jet came into prominence during the Victorian era after King Albert died. Queen Victoria went into an extended period of mourning and wore jet jewelry that affected fashion widely. Back then, it was mined in Yorkshire on the coast of England, but the rough jet I can buy downtown to cut into the shapes I want is from Tibet, where the Buddhism I studied originated.
My second cup of coffee is on the table next to me, Beethoven’s Third symphony is playing, and I am feeling almost happy to be delving into the realm of a material I’ve never used before. I draw some designs on my sketch pad, then read on the computer screen about jet’s properties. It is a soft material with a hardness factor ranging from two point five to four, which is about what our fingernails have. Every gem is graded on its hardness, which means how resistant it is to being scratched. A diamond has the highest grade of all—a ten—which is why nothing can scratch it, not even steel since it has only a seven. I like that jet doesn’t have that superhard quality, especially for my work since part of getting through grief is about not resisting. Though it might be nice to add a semiprecious stone to the jet that would back it up somehow, have a piece of resilience so it isn’t all soft. Topaz has a hardness of eight and its smoky brown would be beautiful against jet’s soft black.
The Eroica symphony is building to its peak when suddenly a heinous noise cuts through, tearing it in two. I jump off my stool and run out of the studio and down the hall before my mind registers what I’ve heard—self-preservation if there ever was—but I see it as soon as I turn the corner into my living room. There, through the open windows, in the beautiful silver-green-leafed, silver-brown-barked tree, is a small, dark man wielding a chain saw. Entire branches are falling to the ground. Huge, strong, living limbs are being amputated, and with each mutilating stroke more sunlight comes streaming in. The curtain of green is being torn apart in front of me.
“No!” I shout as I run out the door, and continue shouting as I fly down the stairs, finally stopping at the base of the tree. Two men are standing near me, eyeing me as if I am a crazy woman. “Stop!”
The man in the tree notices the commotion, and turns off his saw while looking down at me. He is in a harness tied to the tree—the tree amicably supporting its destroyer.
“No more cutting,” I yell up to him. “It’s July. You can’t prune a tree right now—it’s in the middle of its growth season. You’re killing it, don’t you see?”
“No comprende,” the man says over and over, smiling each time. He looks at his compatriots and smiles more broadly.
I turn to them. One of them has to be some kind of a foreman, has to speak English of some kind. But they smile at me and repeat the other man’s line.
I don’t even want to think about what this means about the odds of them being licensed arboriculturists, but of course if they were, they wouldn’t be pruning a perfectly healthy tree in the middle of summer in a style that can only be described as demolishing.
I yell “Stop” a few more times, but the roar of the saw eats up my words, then branches start falling all around me like the London Blitz, but without a country to fight back with me. I retreat up the stairs, holding my ears against the terrible noise, unable to look at the violence they are waging.
I go into my studio to try to sit down to work, but my entire insides are trembling. Huge waves of anger are roiling back and forth, trapped inside my body. They hit one side of me, then slap up against the other, then back again, like a filled vessel unable to be emptied out. This must be what my boxing coach was always yelling about, wanting me to get some anger out in my hooks. “Goddamn vegetarian,” he’d say. “Eat some meat, put some blood in your punches, I can see that tofu in your left hook.” I actually don’t eat tofu, but I understand now what he meant. I wish that every heavy-bag punch I ever landed could retroactively express what I need to right now. Not that I want to hit these men who are massacring my tree. An Uzi would be much better. No, I don’t mean that. Okay, frankly, I am glad there are no weapons around because I feel completely at the mercy of my rage. Goddamn motherf*ckers, why is everything being destroyed, never to be seen again?
It is hell sleeping on my couch now that the tree has been desecrated. Light from the street lamp pours into my living room, a horrendous luminous reminder of the brutality that occurred. When I finally do fall asleep around four or five A.M., I awaken a few hours later in that nonremembering slumber state and am shocked each time to see the terrible stubby limbs, the sad absence of leaves, the piece of wood that used to be a tree. And the tree isn’t even a ghost of itself because a ghost is all spirit with no form. This tree has lost both.