From witless to shitless

Perhaps of my early-on visceral attitude on so many aspects of life that I am now utterly disabled at going about things in a cerebral process. Much less chopping any situation in a rationalized manner. Until today, 5 months after the fact.

I've shared only the physical details with a few friends, but when it came right down to the middle murky ones, I've conveniently skipped it. My attempt at writing this down is my very feeble atonement to mark this tangibly and let it dissipate from my memory, once and for all.

Last October, I was standing on Pont des Art, savoring the silence, the freedom and the solitude. I was mesmerized by the beauty and the calm of the Seine River, the surrounding rich-in-green trees, the intricate structure of the Louvre, and drawn in to the Parisian animosity. At one point, I was so lost in my own thoughts that I didn't hear an old woman creep up beside me. She was clearly poor, and asking me for money, in French. I politely walked away though I was scared witless. She followed me several times, and in each passing, I would walk faster and faster to the point where I'd run away from her. [To defend myself, a lot of people did this after seeing her too.]

She was wearing few layers of tattered clothes, her head bundled up with a dirty blue scarf so that you could only see her face with a few strands of her grey hair. She had a really bulky and thick nose, grey eyes, cracked lips and very crinkly wrinkled skin. She has a lot of difficulty walking because of her broken right ankle, so broken in fact, that she drags her ankle on the planks of the bridge. Her right ankle and foot together literally form a 'L' shape. Her voice was so hoarse and raspy, probably from dehydration.

I only had one eye contact with this woman, and it was impressionable enough for me to think that she looked like the evil witches in the Snow White, Rapunzel, Henzel and Gretel etc. Since that day, I've had recurring dreams about her. About 5 or 6 times. I usually wake up in fear. Every time after dreaming about her, I brush it off and carry on my routine because honestly, I am too busy to rationalize this.

This morning, I told a friend about these recurrent dreams. She told me to pray about it and thinks it's my conscience tugging at me for not giving money or food to the very old woman. This afternoon on the GO train, I, after 5 months, finally explored this on my own, in the seclusion of my head: it might be God testing my almost now non-existent compassion. Tonight, among slews of other conversation topics with my best friend, proposed my dreams to be the old woman's passing spirit who has come to haunt me. I was then scared shitless.

He then attempted to rationalize my spiritual reasoning, that God would know what I fear, and would never present himself to me that way. Furthermore, I will surely not fly to Paris to find this scary old witchy woman, feed her with food or shower her with money, just to ease my conscience. So my only options are to pray about it or just accept that the witchy old woman has passed on and is haunting me. Neither of which seem to be cerebrally possible, in part or in entriety. Hmmm...

Glass and clone

Someone with two very capable hands and unlimited patience can take a few fragmented piece of glass and piece them together. It may look put-together to the unsuspecting eye but to the keen eye, it's just a cloned attempt. The clone can't pretend to be put-together because it has scars and unsightly marks to prove it, to remind it. The capable hands also know they can't fully piece it to the way it was, but settles for the clone for what it has become.

So, how are they going to meet in the middle?