I was barely functioning the past few days due to the alarmingness of everyone getting sick at the same time. I was holding on by a thread, worrying about everyone, on the verge of tears, neglecting myself, feeling helpless. But I'm hanging in there because it's temporary and entirely out of my hands. I'd been self medicating and nothing worked until I finally focused my mind on archaeology, a thing that always absorbs my full imagination, the best drug I've found. Today I am feeling better.
It helps me psychologically, to study the dead and the treasures they left behind. Bones and mummies and neolithic burials remind me that death has been with us always. There is a sentimentality and peace in discoveries of ancient humans, a proof of existence that calms me. They were just like us. We think they're gone but they're not entirely, because we're still learning from them. Even in their silence, we are listening, thousands of years later. It's beautiful how much we care about humans we never knew who died millennia before we arrived. It's meaningful to me.
I've been thinking about how Anne Frank died just months or weeks before the camps were liberated, and if only she'd held on just a little bit longer... It's an odd way to comfort myself, and I'm not trapped in a death camp, but... I identified a lot with her. Everyone thought I was her reincarnation when I was young and my whole life was marked by recurring holocaust nightmares. And of course I've always kept a diary too. When I was 19 I found myself in Amsterdam by chance in the neighborhood of the Anne Frank house and stood outside on the sidewalk and looked up at her window through the trees and had a moment... Time seemed to continue for all the restless souls around me but for me time stopped.
I always had a vague feeling like I'd lived many lifetimes, or maybe I'm just exhausted, but this feels like my final life, the one where I finally get to be and do everything I didn't get to do before. In this life I don't have descendants to live on through, so when I die, it will be final, and I and all my ancestors and I will be at peace.
When I had an abortion after the "father" disappeared, I made the responsible choice, and my subconscious produced a dream that gave complete closure. My daughter was around 13 years old. I hugged her. We had a long loving embrace, as if in some other dimension she was very real, though in this timeline it wasn't meant to be. I still have the feeling like somewhere in some quantum realm, in some mirror universe, we are together, or she lives but I died. But for one dream, we were able to say goodbye. It felt profound. She didn't speak, just like when I dreamed of my grandmother. Maybe I was in her dream, deceased in her reality, though not in this one, my soul still managing to find her across space and time to comfort her.
Years later I have no regrets. This lifetime's body couldn't physically or mentally withstand pregnancy and I don't want my unborn children to suffer. It's still not too late to have kids, but then I see the pope and am reminded to protect my kin from exactly that sort of person. I'll DIE before producing children for people like him to abuse. Get your grubby male hands off my bloodline. These eggs are not yours to play with. I keep my treasures safe inside me where no man can touch or exploit them or play god to compensate for their inferiority. Show me a world that's safe for children, and I'll reconsider.
Until then, I give birth to dreams.
7:46 a.m. - 2022-01-12