Feeling Impotent

A sure sign my brains are rotting:

Bad dream about bad touch uncle. Haven't had one in years. And it wasn't that bad, but he was there, at a family gathering, and the air was hot and damp with summer, the lighting was bad, everything was shadowy and uncertain, and I could see him, sitting there in a recliner. It may have been the 80s, I felt young. He was wearing a ringer shirt; red around the collar and sleeves.

I wondered why he was there, and why no one was doing anything about it.

So I slunk around, afraid to be seen by him, afraid to engage with anyone because I didn't want to upset anybody.

I don't remember if the dream would have been before or after I woke at 5 a.m., panicking a bit and fretting over the fact that I've not heard a word from Chris's sister, my friend of nearly nine years, despite a couple of emails and two texts, in the three weeks since I wrote the first email.

But it seems to work either way. In general, I'm feeling pretty impotent. She avoids conflict (though I'm not even sure what the conflict would be here, so that compounds my impotence), and I've done as much as I should without being pushy.

I'm a doer and a planner. I like to take an active role. There's nothing to be done, and nothing to plan for but two vacations that seem altogether too far off. A month away. I'm too sad to do things at home so I just sit on the couch. I've lost momentum, I am mostly coping with loss, doping myself with Friday Night Lights and Downton Abbey and numbing movies because there isn't the energy in my limbs to do anything else.

I should clean out my juicer. Take out the garbage. But today is not a day where those things will get done. It's taken about all I've got to convince myself to sit down for a bit and start a painting, which I'm all ready for, the tools are in front of me...

So, paint.