Really?
Or, disorder in the court
I’m enjoying some time off this week with family and friends in faraway places. But I had to share another strange sign from the universe—or perhaps directly from David.
You know those dizzy spells I mentioned last week? They haven’t happened since at least 2018, when I experienced another migraine attack and had a couple of limited vertigo aftershocks. Until then, I’d had my Meniere’s Syndrome, an inner ear disorder, under control for a few decades.
Well, I reengaged with the retrial last week. Although we’ve never spoken and decency and decorum warrants respect and distance, I felt it was important for me to be in the courtroom to show up for Mia Reales Dominguez, Carlos’s little sister, taking the stand again. As someone about to start high school in the fall, she’s the youngest person who’s sat in that seat, and in my view, the bravest.
As usual, things were a bit behind schedule so Monday’s witnesses were moved to Tuesday. This included Mia and her father, Juan Carlos Reales.
So, back into the 92-degree Davis heat I went, a whopping 20 degrees warmer than the usual San Francisco climate, my body and mind full of stress and grief and angst.
I had a massive migraine that night.
It took a while for the hangover dizziness to arrive—but when it did, I was sitting, of all places, in the courtroom.
“Shit,” I thought. Not wanting to cause a scene, as someone who’d sold pot to Carlos explained text exchanges and dispensary visits, I grabbed the side of the bench and focused hard enough until a thankfully early break at 10:40 am, five minutes before the customary 10:45.
What followed was incomprehensible to me: being helped into a side room by the associate DA and lead investigator for the defense, and ultimately shedding many tears while being wheeled out in an office chair by Karim’s parents, to my friend Susie’s car.
Why was I crying? There was the feeling of helplessness, for sure, and also sadness at missing the testimony I was there for. But it went much deeper than this, to another strange and tragic synchronicity and full-circle moment: The first and only other time I had such a debilitating dizzy spell where someone specifically pushed me out to a car was in the mid 1990s and it was David. David arrived on the scene at my job at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, along with my partner Cynthia, to help wheel me in an office chair to Cynthia’s waiting vehicle, after I cried into his chest and he hugged and supported me.
What grand irony was this?
I took this as the clearest sign yet that David wants me the hell out of Dodge—or in this case, Superior Court of Yolo County—and to continue taking care of myself and distancing myself from a painful retrial.
In Susie’s room with the blinds closed and the overhead fan spinning, I started feeling okay. I tuned into the live courtroom and watched Mia’s testimony from a dimmed phone screen. But I knew something was over. Something else is already well in motion, expanding every day to more fully take its place—a new sense of purpose, a greater sense of calm, a more expansive view of the world and my role within it—and it’ll take a lot more than pesky dizzy spells to whirl it off-course.