illegitimi non carborundum

I am utterly exhausted. I woke up at 5am this morning from a devastating dream. Occasionally I have these dreams about Cristi where she comes back into my life somehow (how it's done is different, depending on the dream) and says she never died but is still alive, and just hasn't been able to contact anyone since the plane crash. I'm always shocked and ecstatic in these dreams, where the impossible becomes reality. And then I wake up, and realize that she's still gone.

I tend to think about her a lot especially during times of chaos and stress. And packing up my apartment always makes me sad, every single time, regardless of where I'm going. It's such a reflective time, pondering old trinkets and rereading stacks of letters. My dear friend K left me a wonderful message on my birthday about an astrological phenomenon called Saturn Returns. Apparently every 29 (or so) years, Saturn returns to the exact same spot it was when you were born. The long and short of it -- a turbulent time that symbolizes flushing out the bad and the old and turning over a new leaf. A paragraph from a website I found (called 'Aquarius Papers', interestingly enough):

The Saturn return always occurs between the age of 27 and 29, seemingly lasts a lot longer, and is one of the most feared and misunderstood points in personal evolution. It is usually a difficult time with a lot of stress and pressure, where things come to an end, hard realizations are faced, and the weight of the world is felt, very acutely. However, it is also a time of many opportunities to make important choices and decisions, moving out of unconscious patterns and obsolete conceptions of our purpose into more deliberate and thoughtful expressions of our unfulfilled self.