His face in my dreams seizes my guts He floods me with dread Soaked in soul, he swims in my eyes by the bed Pour myself over him, moon spilling in... And I wake up alone. -Wake Up Alone, Amy Winehouse
I dreamt a dream one night and it felt like an ending. In it, I rejected you for once, albeit after I almost didn’t. But I did; I told you off and then walked out into the rain, and rain, in dreams and in waking-life, means a cleansing, a clearing, new beginnings. I woke feeling like I had exorcized you from my subconscious, that wanting you with me wouldn’t haunt me anymore.
We haven’t seen or spoken to each other in years, and in my awake-life, with Time’s help, I have come to be fine with that, to prefer it, even. Sure, I wonder about you sometimes, but only because you’d still visit me in my dreams, do your usual thing: make mischief that felt exciting but that I now know to be a kind of captivity of my own making, and when I laid awake in the dark of the morning, I’d feel bad about everything all over again. And part of my routine of getting ready for the day would have to be re-convincing myself that mistakes I’ve made do not define my future. And that someday I will find someone who makes me excited and who also keeps me safe in every way; safe for real, and not a safety that I try to will into existence out of my denial.
Those dreams felt less like a visit, and more like I was wrestling with something that was actually not you. Maybe you were showing up as a warning: I am falling into my same old traps again. Sometimes you would show up right when I had made a decision, a resolution to do things differently, to protect my heart more, to be kinder to myself and not judge myself for the ways I’ve been fooled and the ways I let myself stay foolish. And then at night, there you were. It did not feel like encouragement.
I have written down dreams of you in notes in my phone, entries in dream journals, paragraphs in notebooks where I collect random thoughts and the beginnings of stories. They felt important somehow. I once heard that when we dream of people we recognize, it is our souls visiting with one another. Self-servingly, I like the idea of your soul coming to see mine – not the other way around. I like believing that your soul must check in with mine sometimes, that it knows you owe me something, something undefined and nebulous, but definitely there. A cloud inside a dotted line. I can live (and am living) without it – whatever it is – and maybe your soul still struggles with passing it off to me finally, just as you seemed to at the end of things in waking-life. Because my dreams of you themselves are struggles; they are fraught; you send people to chase me, or wait behind closed doors that I open, or emerge from a crowd where I wasn’t searching for you. In the dreams, I still find myself concerned for your safety, or wanting to spend time with you alone, and the dreams won’t allow it. Even after all of this time, it is still the wrong answer. That was never what you came to me for, awake or asleep.
And then I dreamt the dream where I wanted to be alone with you as usual, but no, I then have an abrupt change of heart. For once you are willing, but I reject your advance, and I tell you why I won’t do it, and I walk out into the rain with no umbrella. I woke up in triumph. I no longer needed the thing you owe me! I never did! I got up, showered, rejoicing in that new freedom, a weight off of my subconscious. I had finally gotten a piece of my heart back.
But the exorcism was not complete.
You still appear in the periphery of my dreams. Almost literally materializing out of the background (last night, there was a party in a house where there were few lights on, and most of the party-goers were students of mine, current and former, but you appeared upstairs, dressed in all black, even a black baseball cap which I never saw you wear in waking-life, just barely discernible from the dark rooms and hallways in this party house), and while in the dreams I may still feel the same old pull to be with you, or rather, to keep you with me, you tend to disappear back into the crowds or the background you emerged from before too much can be said or done. I still wake up and catalog my mistakes, and sometimes connect them to mistakes I’m still making, and maybe I just need to accept that as long as I am searching for the one who makes me feel safe and not like I am still searching, and who’s to say, maybe even after I find him, maybe I should always expect cameo appearances from you.
In dreams, sometimes you hardly speak, and sometimes your words tug on me like they always did. Either way, when I wake up, I feel silly for almost wanting you again, for not being able to shake you from my subconscious, for having to admit that maybe I’ve not made as much progress as I’d thought. I know I don’t want you anymore, but it seems that I still want something connected to you. My get-ready-for-the-day routine consists of affirmations (alright, consolations most of the time, but I mean them to be affirmations), and there it is – maybe that is why your soul makes its appearance from time to time. To remind me that I am not only a human who has made mistakes, but that I am human with a big beautiful heart, who makes room in it for people for better or for worse, and even though my mistakes have a pattern sometimes, I should never stop being the person who loved you. Even you.
About this picture: In March 2015, I had just purchased my DSLR camera, and I spent a lot of time playing around with it, learning the controls and settings. I was dating someone, and I spent a lot of time at his apartment. We loved to drink red wine together in the evening, and these were our glasses on his nightstand one night. Clearly, I still think about him quite a bit. Our relationship had its challenges, but it meant a lot to both of us, I think. I hope he’s well. I thank him (and dream-him) for the inspiration for this, my first post.
Pictures Worth a Thousand Words 