Dreams of Home

I dream I am a ghost in the Castle. I see my neighbors on the stairs and I'm glad I am back home, but they won't look at me except for Jenny the Light Bringer, who acknowledges me like she did when I said goodbye, but who is emotionally under involved with my presence.  Perhaps this is why I never got to be friends with her. I wanted to be, for years, because she lives down the hall, has an unusual but chipper perspective and does fun projects with arts and kids. Her unacknowledged life partner, Steve, will probably see me. We have a shared appreciation of chaos. If he weren't busy picking up on a young female they had a meeting with, he would probably think it was funny if I tripped him on the stairs and recognize it wasn't intended to be mean.

The fact that my neighbors kind of elbow past me on the stairs is a giveaway. I am perhaps still slightly awkward, but nothing like when I was younger, so that doesn't explain it. I know too many people here, people I've become comfortable enough with to be  friendly with even if they're outside our immediate castle cliche.

Someone would definitely get in a conversation with me about dogs- should they adopt one? Is the new board "owner and resident friendly"? Wasn't that an especially loud wedding last night and wasn't the music horrible? And why are the Boys from Brazil moving after so many years? The "Boys", our immediate neighbors when in town and not Brazil, gave us a set of wooden carved animal salad tongs for our wedding with a nice note, so we let go for now that the bitchier Boy asked if I was pregnant when I wore a tight dress to the Christmas tree trimming party. In fact, my looking pregnant says to me that I have spot fat at most. That he asked me again though, just to hear me repeat, "I'm not pregnant, I'm fat" was sheer bitchiness. His partner, the other Boy from Brazil is nicer. But none of these topics come up on the stairs. Do they all believe Feb that I've hacked their email?

I should go into Feb's, the building manager's, unit and break a couple plates. Maybe the blue ones she has behind glass and offered to lend for my wedding before she stopped speaking to me, long before I disappeared. Leif likened it to "shunning". I failed to take her advice and abandon my blog in favor of detailess Castle propaganda; they have their website for that. Dickens, her cat, does sees me but is unimpressed, though I am impressed as always by Dickens who is furry and squishy faced. She's a store bought Persian.

I stand on Feb's balcony where the Jackie Chan "V8" commercial was filmed and wonder again if she gets the individual profits though her balcony is technically a common area, but the trick is one would have to go through her apartment to get to it. Leif always wanted to Tarzan down from our balcony on a rope and say hi and sip a drink. Anyway, it is no longer technically Feb's apartment. She lives there still but has sold it to a man who does dead people makeup, is apparently at the peak of his career in it. I guess that technically makes him an artist and a likely Castle resident. I wonder if he worked on "The Man in the Bathtub" after he died or knew him during his internship with the morgue. Anyway, the morgue beautician doesn't live here; Feb does and I will break her plates.

Onto the 3rd floor. Here is the set decorator who designed for "Alf" the alien puppet 80's show and has gotten in suspiciously well with Feb. Probably he still has Alf and Alf wants to eat Dickens. The neighbor has gained weight since his big dog died, he carried her up and down the stairs when she could no longer walk so she could be on the Castle lawn, even though dogs aren't supposed to. To their credit no one ever reprimanded him and it's not like his dog could run around.

Carl (though I am sure he was born Carlos), the elevator guy, brings the outdated and famous in the West elevator up to the 3rd floor, but does not stop it for me. He hasn't liked me ever since I crashed a prom that used the Castle (see blurry picture below).

I try wandering my own hall and sit on a modernist chair outside Gallery 401, my neighbor's the Friends of Castle Greens' apartment with beautiful furniture and plans to reclaim the biannual Castle tour with an independent tour in which Leif, I and my dollhouses promised to join them.

It hurts me that Leif and I never participated in the largely 4th floor supported DooDah Parade. DooDah's organizers and a former and forever DooDah Queen (the unmarried daughter of the Friends of Castle Green) live on the 4th floor. They also dwell in the Grand Salon and on the Castle roof where they drink and have stolen my husband away from me with a drink too many. He claimed, that like the Oracle at Delphi, the bottle had helped him evaluate our marriage clearly. I am yet another sacrifice to the Castle or I guess Leif is, because he'll continue to live here. It's probably because I barely drink that the Castle rejected me as one of its priestesses. I knew I should have poured booze in its fountains, when its Koi were stolen. I have fucked up with the Castle as much as with Leif.

We went together to DooDah Queen Tryouts the day I got back from Venice after our two week separation. Leif fell in love with me again as he drank steadily during the judging, but on the long hot walk back to the Metro station (he hates driving but loves trains) Leif broke down on the sidewalk crying, but blamed our divorce all on me. At least he was upset about it, that one time.

Isabel, our little girl dog, was a star at DooDah Queen Tryouts, rivaling even the queen hopeful with condoms as her skirt and pasties. Neither of them won, but Isabel didn't only because she wasn't entered. If any little dog could be, Isabel would surely have been elected queen. She would have humped her Daddy's arm like she does to impress the judges then spun around in excited circles. And her reign over Pasadena that year would have been mighty and beneficent. But instead, Isabel with me is moving to Portland where my mother has bribed us with a 600 sq. ft. condo unit with it's own pointed roof like a little house. Even the bearded lady at the Venice Freak Show yesterday said that despite the rain she'd move to Portland for a little house; and we are.

Isabel with Jessa, the pretty bearded lady at the Venice Freak Show

I am fully moved out of the Castle; Leif and I are not just separated. We packed my boxes, they were picked up and are awaiting me in Portland for when the little condo house becomes my mother's and she gives it to me like a kitten. I am back in Venice Beach waiting on the move-in date and my flight to Portland. I consider this little house a consolation prize since I lost my husband; this is how my mother convinced me to move to Portland where she and my stepfather live. She says no one helped her through her divorces and she wants to do that for me.

Since no one saw me on the Castle stairs or even my own hall for the better part of a day or perhaps years, it is not as fun and comforting as I thought it would be, being back home at Castle Green.

I always seek comfort and safety so I go to my actual home, our 4th floor apartment with my brass troll doll ornament still on the door because Leif couldn't get it off when the moving men came. I probably could have, but I didn't want to disappear entirely, but I may have anyway.

Still, my troll doll knocker is on the door and I still have keys to our apartment, which allows me to come in, in accordance with our spiritual settlement. Spikey yips when I enter our apartment even though at 15 years old he is deaf (but cute and bad as ever). I can't calm him, because I can't touch him. This is what Skyping with the little white dog, as Leif has promised we will do, is going to be like.

All my furniture is gone from our apartment, except for the pieces I let Leif keep or that were his to begin with. Maybe that's why I can't pet Spikey now, my presence in the apartment isn't strong enough, despite the antique silver-plate knives, forks and spoons that I left in the drawer because I only took the ones that had belonged to family. The actual silver ones were given to my cousin and brother which seems unfair because they are boys, but they are richer and/or socialer so my family assumed they were likelier to need them.

My microwave oven is still in our kitchen, I've donated it to the apartment because it was ours for 9 years. I give the glass tray inside a spin; I am not after all too ethereal for that.

In an attempt to calm Spikey I sit down next to him and my napping husband on the bed, where they have spent the day sleeping though it is now late in the afternoon. Later Leif will get up, walk Spikey, and for dinner defrost the pasta I had in the freezer for 2 years.

Spike watches me lie down now. I am cautiously curving my body around Leif to get as close as possible to him, but not wake him and piss him off. Spikey settles down but he doesn't burrow into me like usual, perhaps because I provide no warmth.

I wake up later in the little guest shack at Missie's, with Isabel curled around me. I have kept her warm at least. I am soothed briefly by my visit to the Castle which was, until I woke up, my home.