TRIGGER WARNING: Vague discussion of SA, further into the post
THAT photo actually is my cat. One of them. The one who still lives with me. Unity.
Photo for tax. Something quite a bit lighter in tone than parts of this post will be, but that’s okay.
Last night, Unity was in the way of my CPAP equipment, as I was getting ready for bed. I told myself I would just “rest my eyes” a moment and strap into the mask in a bit. HA! I fell asleep, as I always do, when I do this. Didn’t sleep as deeply, as a result.
Also, sometime in the night or earlier morning, she knocked the pizza pan off the top of the stove. It clattered to the kitchen floor. I imagine she was helping herself to Garlic Cheese Texas Toast crumbs. Then, she loudly got sick, off said crumbs.
SO… not the greatest night’s sleep, last night.
HOWEVER… there was an upside. Yes, I hit a very hard wall of solid fatigue at work tonight, and it was a real struggle not to get cranky. BUT… since I was closer to the surface of my mind, I remembered more of my dreams. Typically, on nights when I have an earlier alarm, I may forget them. If I can sleep in a bit, I stand a better chance, having drifted out of deep sleep on my own, before the proverbial buzzer.
In one of them, I was at home. It looked pretty much like it does right now, only a tall, very hot goth guy (with gorgeous long, dark hair) was making me dinner. Weirdly, he was preparing lasagna in a couple frying pans? The meat was there, and the sauce, and some noodles just lying flat, not even stacked. But it was supposed to be lasagna. I asked how long it would take to cook. He said a few hours.
Possibly inspired by my recently heating up a Stouffer’s lasagna for myself, one night.
Anyway, at one point, I told him, “I’m sorry I’m so messy,” meaning the conditions of the apartment. He seemed slightly annoyed, but he didn’t say anything back.
Not sure what to make of that?!
The other dream…
I have to preface this one a bit.
The guy who was in the other dream was someone I knew in real life. We’d seen each other off and on for 5 years, and I think it took 5 years beyond that for me to get over it. If I even did.
There was an incident… something he did, that I did not consent to. In the moment, I let it go, because it was short-lived, and he had really normalized the whole thing, like it was no big deal.
It wasn’t until after he’d left me and moved overseas that I processed how completely wrong it really was. Maybe that was when I felt safe enough to work through it.
You’d think given that, that I would hate him. Or, if failing that, if I had somehow forgiven him, that I would at least be immune to continuing to romanticize him. But I’m not.
I fell SO hard for him, and the feelings were incredibly intense, in every direction.
He’s the one my one therapist said I probably couldn’t completely erase from my psyche without doing myself “considerable damage.”
It wasn’t all good, by any means, obviously. But I think of him fondly from time to time. Which is part of why, I think, reading Lost Souls, I get why Ann can’t bring herself to utterly despise Steve. What happened there was decidedly more violent, but still.
The last I ever heard from him IRL I believe was when he messaged me that he might not be coming back this time. And he never did return.
We took turns blocking each other on the dating app where we met, at one point. It was chaotic on both sides. He never said he loved me, only that “It’s not that I don’t have feelings for you, but…” then never finished his sentence. I never said I loved him IN PERSON because I didn’t want him to feel pressured into saying it back, or make him uncomfortable. But I said a lot by messages. I was able to be more open that way.
Given such a hot-and-cold, tumultuous connection, would he have kept coming back, over many miles and much time, for 5 years, if he didn’t love me? Maybe. Who knows? Variable reinforcement is addictive. Maybe we were just stuck on each other.
The dream: he was sleeping in a van, getting ready to head off on some kind of adventure (“…in a van, down by the river,” anyone?). This time, we got to kiss goodbye.
A few years ago, I had encountered a profile on the app where we met, with his home city listed as the location. There was no photo, but some details reminded me of him. So I Googled around, to see if I could find out if he was back in the area.
I found his obituary, instead.
Still don’t know how he died, just that it happened overseas, and that he had remarried, quit smoking, started a teaching career, and gained a substantial amount of weight (no shame… I did, too, eventually, after he left, and am only now starting to take it all off).
I had once dreamed something involving him (after learning of his death) that felt very much like a gritty afterlife kind of scenario. Cigarettes weren’t harmful there. They were flavorless but still somehow mentally satisfying. I blew smoke in his face to be flirty and silly. We roamed the city scantily clad and amorous, before attending a “non-monogamous screening” of Rocky Horror Picture Show. We were definitely non-monogamous, by default, because he was only ever around once or twice a year. And that wasn’t enough to please either of us. AND he always gave me the out that if I found someone willing to date seriously, he would understand.
After the movie screening scene, I lost track of him, but a girl I met said she would talk to him for me, I think about my discomfort with how he acted in the theater, or maybe about the non-monogamous part.
Anyway, the next day, I had said to my bestie that I hoped that was comparable to the afterlife, if there is one. Smoking and makeup and lingerie and drag and excess, and none of it the least bit dangerous, or frowned upon.
Last night’s dream was more peaceful. It felt like a proper goodbye.
I certainly do NOT cite my history as an example of how to live your life. He and I probably should have called it quits WELL before he drifted away. We both tried.
I’m not certain if, maybe after I’ve gone through the EMDR trauma therapy I’m working on with my therapist (been stalling about talking about that particular episode with him), if I would be capable of a healthy relationship. Maybe I’m not. Or at least not a “normal” one.
But my bestie encouraged me and said, “If you can’t, then just date messy and wild,” not that I should quit it altogether. Still kind of keeping a cautious distance from all of it. I guess I’m waiting for someone to blow my mind enough that my barriers come down, again. That’s typically how I’ve fallen in love before.
OH… on a lighter note, since we need that after all of THAT… as I was browsing through albums on my phone, looking for a suitable pic of Unity sleeping (do you like my massive cat-face bedroom curtain?), I found the albums labelled by who appears in them.
I had the option to name each of the cats, for those albums, and both of my parents, and my friend Neva, since they all reappear often. I even had an album created of my phone of pics of David the vampire LOL. So, for the hell of it, I labelled that one, too.
But what REALLY amused me, was that my phone couldn’t distinguish between myself and my daughter. That album had my name on it, but a mix of photos of each of us. And it’s not as if we were both in most of them. Most, I think, were just her, or just me.
My little mini me. Or younger me. Only different. We may be nearly carbon copies physically, but we have very different personalities. And that’s totally okay.
Alright, here’s something pretty I found, to close out the post. Wishing you all sweet dreams. Maybe someone spicy-looking will be making YOU dinner in YOUR kitchen, in your next one. Or, maybe your dreams will help bring you much-needed closure.
All the Bright and Sparkly Things 
Leave a comment