Going Driftless in anticlimatic

I’m beginning to get that Apocalypse Now eye. Twitchy. Paranoid. Unsure of anything. Not confidant in myself, or anyone. I feel like I aught to wake up. Like the dream has been revealed, and now it aught to collapse, and I should wake in my bed elsewhere in a completely different world whose memory is temporarily blocked in this one. I sensed it coming and thought I needed some time alone to organize my thoughts, but time spent alone only expedited the fissure.

Gilbert and his wife died, I found out, within minutes of each other. “Gilbert is one of a kind” my Dad would always say. Kind and simple and just kept on living and living all the way into his late 90s. 94 years old and he used to plow our shop with is tractor anytime it snowed (he lived in the house that our shop, a former blacksmith barn from 1890, was right next to- in fact the original blacksmith built and lived in gilbert’s house until he himself was well into old age, before splitting the shop from the house, selling them both, and dying two years later).

His grandson Mitch, was actually my best friend all through grade school- from the day he stood up for me in 2nd grade and we sat next to each other in Mr Green’s class up until middle school or so we were inseparable, always spent the night at each other’s houses. He died of Leukemia in his early 20s. But I spent plenty of time in his grandpa, Gilbert’s house, back when the neighborhood was poor and bright and full of kids and overgrown with huge unkempt maple trees and cedar shrubs.

My own Grandma has grim prospects I discovered. Her knee is about to give out and send her to a wheel chair, aka a hospital bed, aka the grave (according to her), and she won’t get surgery because she’s too old (I agree), but she’s meeting with a new doctor tomorrow to see if there might be any other options out there. Her last hail Mary before the ship goes down I fear. She told me the news over her kitchen table, and although I wanted to be positive I was certain she got enough of that from my mother, so I just nodded grimly like I understood the situation. Because I do.

It’s this constant sense of worlds coming apart. It never ends. Is that life, then? I did hear that “all of life is an exercise in saying goodbye” but I hate the concept and will myself not to believe it.

Still, I am dogged lately by the Slaughterhouse Five-esque intrusive flashes of bygone people and places and eras and scenes and entire worlds that exist now quite literally only in my own memory. And also places that don’t exist. Like odd patterns, and memories of places only imagined in fever dreams- or is it only the imagination of a memory, and not an actual memory? Is there even a difference?

Anytime I’m cooking and the vegetables are getting fragrant, and I am facing a wall, or the sink, or the spice rack- I swear behind me I can hear a TV on with reruns of Three’s Company and I can almost feel the balls of my great grandma’s knit sofa cover on the back of my neck. That faint stench of stale cigarette oil leftover from the 1970s- still there, seeping through the paint they tried to freshen things up with in the 90s, which are no longer quite so fresh themselves.

It’s like dead worlds within dead worlds within dead worlds. So many at this point that I can no longer count them, no longer hold my own origin as a measurable frame of reference. Now I am just drifting through space untethered to a past that has died on me several times over at this point.