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Twelve days ago I stopped drinking coffee, knowing that a terrible headache was just hours away.  And once the headache set in, I knew that it would last for days, accompanied by an ever increasing need to sleep.  An insatiable desire to sleep.

But about three days ago the headache finally began to fade, along with the need to sleep.  In fact, it seems like suddenly I hardly need any sleep at all.  Five hours suddenly seems more then enough.  Life is different without a coffee cup in my hand.  I’m constantly aware that something is missing.  I find the need to hold onto something.

Is that what coffee does?  Fill a need for ritual?

So what do people do when they stop drinking coffee?  I don’t know about other people, but I have begun poking at things with sticks.  The more awake I become, the more I want to poke.  I think I’m becoming more curious, if that is even possible.  I think I’m planning on going places that I’ve never been.  I think I’m going to stir things up a bit.

Last night I picked up the phone and made a call.  This is the kind of stick poking that I’m talking about.  Suddenly doing things that I have only thought about for years and years.  Passing back through time without a care in the world.  Not worrying about what it means.  No thought of reason.  No coffee cup in my hand.

I called someone I had not spoken to in twenty five years and the call was easy.  I reached back into my life with that old stick and gave the cage a good rattle.  It felt good.  Free.  I talked a little and listened a little.  I learned things I could not have learned from anyone else.  I found out things that I would never have imagined, and I suddenly knew why I had thought certain things at certain times.  Time seemed confirmed somehow, both good and bad, as the death of some were given to me right along with the rediscovery of others.

The stick still seems alive in my hands, like I am still shaking.  But it is all on the inside.  I couldn’t sleep last night, thinking about it, and when I did, my dreams would twist around until I was thinking about it all over again.

I have poked at things with sticks and now I cannot sleep.  I think that if I keep poking I will somehow turn back into myself, just like a dream, all over again.

I’m wondering what percentage of human behavior is a direct result of restlessness.  Randy is correct in thinking that I will poke and prod until my restlessness is pacified.  But pacified?  Is that even possible?  I’m full of theory, ask anyone who knows me, and I will tell you that pacification is not possible.  I didn’t invent poking with sticks, I’m just following human nature.

Restlessness.  Poke.  Restlessness.  Poke.  Restlessness.  Poke.  An endless cycle.  Everything else is just make-believe to dress life up pretty.

One well-meaning reader asks if I’ve tried drinking tea.  A logical suggestion, but one I respectfully decline.  You see, giving up coffee for the moment has nothing to do with the twitching eye side-effects of caffeine.  But it does have something to do with control.  I hate physical control.  I don’t like the idea of one thing having power over another.  And let’s admit it, caffeine has that power.  However small and insignificant that power to control may be, it exists, and once in awhile I find the need to slip from its grasp. 

But slip away from not just the controlling power of caffeine, but the controlling power of repetition.  I recently mentioned the idea of coffee filling a need for ritual.  Only an offhand thought, but one that I began to think could use some further contemplation.  Not because of coffee.  This isn’t about coffee.  This is about our lives and how we move through them. 

Think about all of our rituals and the roles they play in our lives.  Scrape away the many layers of ritual and think about what would be left.  Surely something.  Humans are more then ideas, aren’t we?  Shouldn’t we exist outside of our definition.  Shouldn’t we be able to visit some sort of base level of existence void of the rituals that our minds have created?  Rituals that we so carefully define ourselves with? 

Is there something peaceful at our core?  Or just more of the restlessness, poke cycle?

You know I just make this shit up as I go along, don’t you?
Restlessness.  Poke.  It translates here as: Think.  Type.  Think.  Type.

Someone else thought I should look into the idea that this energy I talk about existed all along, and that it didn’t appear because of no coffee in my life.  That it was the energy itself that said stop, and that perhaps something transpired just days before I made the decision to stop drinking coffee, and that this event was the thing that triggered this pre-existent energy that set everything in motion.

That was a mouthful

Of course.  I couldn’t agree more.  Something did happen.  But not something just days before, but something years before.  My whole lifetime before.  Aren’t all of the decisions we make based on a whole lifetime of experience?  Nothing ever happens one day that doesn’t directly reflect back to the day before it.  Everything is linked.

But finally, getting back to Randy, and his thoughts on my poking around in the past.  Randy is a man of history, and does have an advantage when it comes to reading between the lines of my last post.  He knows much of my history and has offered a list of the people I might have called the other night.

Do you see how everyone is restless to know?  Poking around.  Looking for answers.  Even a man who already knows the answers is curious.

I offer his guesses, along with the briefest of explanations of who these people are.

1. Scott W : Scott was a high school friend and college roommate.  He disappeared in college the very moment he got married.

2. Loren F : Loren was a man I worked for in high school, who for some reason, had a big influence on some of my own thinking.

3. Cindy S : Cindy was the girl who stole my heart in high school.

4. Cowboy Keith : Cowboy Keith was the boy that stole Cindy’s heart in high school.

5. Cecil : Cecil is much harder to explain.  He stole the heart of a different Cindy, who in return, both stole and broke the heart of an even different Keith.  Cecil wore very thick glasses.

And as much of a historian as my friend Randy is, there are a couple of names that he might have added to his list had he known about them.

6.  Carl V : Carl was a good boy of German heritage, living in Iowa in a depression-era built farm house with seven foot ceilings and six foot doorways.  Carl and I once thought we would set the world record for drinking water in a twenty four hour period.

7. Fred M : Fred hung out with Carl and me, and was perhaps my best friend early in life.  He married his high school sweetheart, is still married to her, and began sending me a photo-Christmas cards about four years ago.

For the record, all of the above is true, as well as the following.

One of the people from the above list is now dead.

Imaginary Keith still lives here.  It’s a fact.  And I’m as curious as everyone as to why he hasn’t been talking.  Could it be his dreams?  Can dreams have the power to silence? 

This morning I sat on the edge of the bed, watching my friend as he dreamt about hitting someone on the head with what looked like a bowling pin.  The sound of the pin connecting solidly with the stranger’s head made me wince.  But whoever it was he was hitting just kept coming on strong, and it was then that I saw that Imaginary Keith was trying to protect someone.  He was giving it his best, swinging away with that bowling pin, and as I looked closer, I could see Imaginary Keith cringe each time the pin made contact.  My friend has never been much of a fighter.

Eventually Imaginary Keith just grabbed the hand of the mysterious someone (a woman at this point) and took off running, dropping the bowling pin so he can concentrate on both escaping and some serious mathematical computations that he has begun to perform in his head.  Just what are the odds that they will escape, he thinks.  And what are the odds that the woman would actually have been attacked?  As they race through the streets, dodging people and jumping in and out of buildings, Imaginary Keith does the math.  He arrives at an answer just as the two of them jump a second story balcony rail and fall into a grassy area.

.25%, he thinks.  Not even a 1% chance that this will end badly.  Why are they running?  Why was he hitting someone on the head?

Imaginary Keith stops dreaming after that.  My friend may dream randomly, but he usually wakes like clockwork.  It’s 6:00 a.m.

“Keith?  Was I dreaming?”

“Yes you were Imaginary Keith.  You were on the run.”

“I can barely remember.  Did I get away?”

“You didn’t have to.  There was nothing to run from in the first place.”

“But I think I was scared.  I can still feel it.”

“Yes.  But it’ll pass.”

“Keith?”

“Yes?”

“I wish she wasn’t dead.”

When I picked up the phone the other night and reached back across twenty five years of silence, I had no idea what waited for me on the other end.  Time moves so slowly we cannot see ourselves growing grey, yet passes so quickly that the transformation is almost sudden.  It is one of the paradoxes that makes time such a mystery, and one of the reasons that life can feel like a dream.  I sometimes think it is my own mind, an uncrossable bridge, that spans the gap of this paradox.  That it is only in thinking that we lose sight of understanding.  In a dream, time is meaningless, and it is only after we awake that things become confusing and we find ourselves trapped on one side of the paradox.

“Keith, do you think it was an accident?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“She was too smart.  I think she knew what she was doing.”

“I know.”

I just wish I could have seen her.  I had something I always wanted to tell her.”

“I know.”

A list was made of the people who I might have called that night.  The night I began poking at things with sticks.  It was a good list, made by a friend, that somehow added to the mystery and the fun.  Life, let’s admit it, is a guessing game.  Everything from mindless entertainment to higher education revolves around the concept of learning or relearning something hidden from us.  Babies play peek-a-boo at the same moment that scientists try to unravel the universe, but take away time and they are surprisingly the same game, a way to lose ourselves in the excitement and complexity of discovery.

“Imaginary Keith, what would you have said to her?  It’s been so long.”

“I know.  But I always thought that the moment I saw her I would know exactly what to say and how to say it.  That it would all come to me when we were face to face.  I don’t know.  I think I wanted to apologize to her for being the way I was back then.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t know what I would have said.  How does one even begin to apologize for being a boy?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t think you have to.”

“You don’t have to.  But maybe sometimes you should.”

If I ever decide to attend a high school reunion, it would be to visit with three people.  In my mind, the others might only be a distraction.  Everyone except the three seem to have had little meaning to my life, and it is hard to imagine how this could have changed in twenty five years.  Maybe I am wrong.  But of all the people in my class there were three who did have meaning.  Three who had an enduring impact.  Cindy S. and Scott W., both of whose names made it to the list, and another girl, Valerie, whose name did not. 

Funny, almost, that it is Valerie’s name that was left off of the list.  Valerie - the girl who returned to high school after leaving early and attending college for a time.  The girl who seemed to pass quietly through life, would become valedictorian, and who I would date for a time my senior year.  The same girl who once told me to stop the car in the middle of a desolate, backwoods road, so that she could push back against her rigid, moral Church of Christ upbringing.  So in the dim moonlight, on a small bridge above an even smaller creek, the two of us drew close and slowly danced.  An innocent but important act in my mind, a sin in hers.

“What was she thinking about as we danced that night?  Do you think she remembered it, Keith?”

“I’m sure she did.”

“For so long I was always sure it meant more to her, that dance in the moonlight.”

“I know.”

“But now that she’s gone, I’m not so sure anymore.  Now I’m the one left remembering.  I’m the one left to wonder.”

As I listened to the news of Valerie, and heard the story told as Valerie’s own mother had told it, I heard a story of sadness and mistake.  A woman who ended up, somehow, as a person who drank too much.  A woman who somehow made the mistake of drinking so much that she accidentally falls asleep in her car, parked in the garage with the motor running, before she has a chance to open the garage door.  But those are the mother’s words, repeated to me by yet another.  Words that seem to only say that there is no way for a mother to be able to understand what has happened to her only daughter.

But as I listened, I could only wonder.  How could she do it?  What turns had her life taken that led to that garage, where she sat looking for the strength to end?  As I listened, I couldn’t help but think that Valerie passed from life in exactly the same way I remembered her living it, dying so quietly that twenty five years would pass before I would hear the sound.

There is a place that is not 40 degrees and nonstop rain.

There is a place where forty phone messages are not waiting to be returned, sitting in a neat pile next to an even neater pile of unpayable bills.

There is a place where people are not always waiting for you to show up.  A place where they don’t call every other day, asking, “when will it be finished?”  A place where people are not forced to speak in a professional tone because they need their business to not shrivel and die.

There is a place where refinancing a house, and making rent, and arranging a divorce are not all daily concerns.

There is a place where people want more then just time to close their eyes and sleep.

I know where that place is, but am having trouble getting there.  It’s like looking for myself in the steamed over bathroom mirror.  I’m there, but I’m not.