The Green Dot

The rain drowns out a dream about rain, and then I'm awake at 3 a.m. in Hawai'i.

It's really something, how life will keep you up once you're awake. There's a book, a good one written by a friend, it sits on the nightstand next to the bed, but I know if I pick it up there's no shot at sleep. There are pieces waiting to be redlined for writers when it's really Sunday, because now it's in between Saturday and Sunday and editing is too much in the darker dark. That will shift at 5:00 a.m. when I usually begin to wrap myself around other people's words. An honor to be trusted with that, and something that requires some light.

On the right of this screen, a list of people in my life who are here on fb, the green dot announcing this - a cyberspace invitation of connection. I scan the list before the names shift as people move into their day in other places where the sun is already up, and the dream isn't as loud as the Waimea rain.

Their places: Boca Raton, Boston, Baltimore, Denver, NYC. San Francisco, Cape Cod, LA, Seattle, Ramsey NJ. That's the order of the people on the right. The first ten, anyway. 

Something about each of them... 

She's in Florida visiting her aging parents, navigating Alzheimer's and sadness.

She's sixty and getting married again. It was a surprise that he asked and she's both terrified and ecstatic.

She misses her person, gone twenty years now, and soon we'll write on the anniversary of her beloved best friend's birthday, remembering what it meant that she was here.

His wife beat cancer and they're going on a cruise to Alaska to celebrate the thing they didn't think they'd get to do together. She had a dream of Alaska and he surprised her with it.

She was raped and never told anyone until she wrote the story in the workshop and now she's advocating for others who were too afraid to speak up.

Her mother is turning 100 and she's pinching herself to have the great gift of that. 

She's an award-winning author, and her first book is still one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever read.
 
She's expecting her first child after years of trying. She's online, reading about what to expect. She, too, is pinching herself at her good fortune, at the dream of her daughter... the one she so wanted but didn't think she'd get to meet.

She taught me that elephants weep for a lost loved one. A story written in a recent writing room that stays with me, that also finds its way into my dreams, like the rain.

She's been sober for twenty years. A milestone she's celebrating, cheered on by those of us who love her.

The rain stopped. And just like that, the names have shifted. All the living we do while we can... all the stories we pull into our hard-beatings hearts.
​
Here's to all of it.