Nothing up my sleeve...

It's coming up to midnight. In an unusual switcheroo, M is snoring away, which apparently is one of the signs of alien abduction. Other signs include the feeling that one has already been abducted, as well as genital pain--can't recall the other 55 signs, but I'll ask M, who has been researching it for some reason, in the morning.

I tried to sleep. For an hour I watched headlights from passing cars wash up against the shore of the bedroom curtains, then recede. Minute wedding flotsam insisted on bumping around in my thoughts while I lay wakeful in the dark, and now they've been pulled by the tide of the TV room lamp beyond my reach. Now how will I confront them? Are they still eddying around in the bedroom darkness, waiting to engulf me when I return?

I read a lovely passage in Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay an hour ago:

"...he began to understand...the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place."

That's me--us. M's magic for me is his power to palm the ash left behind by the scorched rose of my heart. I still taste the bitter grit from time to time, but the memory of that past is fading as a new heart blooms. I know that We probably wouldn't be here, I might not have any love in my life at all, if it weren't for the heartbreak that went before--but, for a wedding gift, I truly wish that I could vanish the past and present M with the me that hadn't been torn to bits, however beautifully mended I am today.

OK, so maybe it wasn't just little wedding things keeping me up.