I go ghost for no damn reason

These days it feels like my head is a huge drafty warehouse and I can watch the lights in the distance blink off. One by one, getting closer. With that groaning industrial click that makes the whole building creak, like some restless monster.

Today I worked and told people about twenty million times that they have to access MyChart through the app, not the browser, how to switch organizations, set up new passwords, talked to interpreters. Older people freaking out about not knowing technology, some of them in tears. At work it feels like my tongue is polished, smooth enough to ice skate on. Answer that, answer this. When I'm not on a call, I'm watching the numbers. To see if they go up. 4 today.

When I'm not watching the numbers, I get bored. And I start looking for things that don't do me any damn good. Looking at old conversations and wondering why, for the love of God, I was so stupid. So stupid. How long ago did I fall asleep and then wake up, not able to look my life in the eye? I'd delete these conversations, but they are around to help me remember to not be that stupid. Ever again. And it works.

In one of my favorite books/movies, Johnny Depp sits in front of his typewriter in a kitschy Las Vegas hotel room, hunting and pecking at the keys like the drugged out character he's playing, a little Jack Sparrow already bleeding through. He reminisces about the mid 1960s and the social turmoil that bubbled throughout, and though he's talking about Sin City in a time and a place I never knew, I always identified with what he's saying.

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.

Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Strange memories in this nervous night. I know what he's talking about. When you're alone with yourself in a quiet place and you look out over the rest of the world, toiling around like ants down there. Things happening with or without you. Makes you lonely, makes you scared. Madness in any direction, well, welcome to April 2020. You could strike sparks anywhere. All you have to do is go online and comment. You can look back and see the high water mark, where the wave broke and finally rolled back. I guess that could apply to any time in history, but who knows if our energy will prevail? If we're even winning.

I'm still waiting on my wave to break. I don't know if it's beautiful, but it's definitely high.

-Rae