We all fall down

Everything just feels wrong and worse. I had to get out of the apartment after I talked to Roommate. When I finally came back all I could do was curl up in bed and try not to cry. Even in sleep I found no peace or solace. In my dreams:

I was at my grandfather’s house, long dead. Someone was after me and my sister. Unlucky for him we overpowered them and with knives the size of small nail files cut off their heads and put them in a sack. We moved the bodies in the back of ‘our’ white SUV. We needed to be somewhere and along the way I planned to find a river to dump the bodies and heads into. My sister almost got into the wrong truck but then I remembered I had to make sure everything was in order in the house. In his kitchen there was always ice cream and snacks and things a small child loves. My grandfather had died previously but his house still had all these things in it. Someone kept rearranging the kitchen though. The fridge would move by the pantry, the shelves would be put in front of the fridge and no one would keep things where they belonged. And then there were the spiders. We had at least a dozen huge brilliantly colored spiders in a tank that I needed to watch but somehow they escaped. I couldn’t leave until I’d caught them all. Only one was poisonous and I was very familiar with them but still when one dropped from the ceiling to crawl over my hand I shook it off, managing to catch it with a small plastic box.  I caught them all except for the dangerous black and red one. I looked under the eve by the front door and saw a nest of common household spider sack and she crawled out from under it.  I finally caught her under a rat and put them both in the tank, but the rat knew how to escape and, being a rat, didn’t think to close the cage so the spider would not get out. By now the sky was lightening and I knew I had to leave if I was going to get rid of the bodies under cover of darkness but everything was in disarray.

I feel like I’m floating this morning. I should have taken the day off work but I have so much to do I can’t afford to take the time. Maybe the distraction will help, but I can’t wrap my mind around what I’m going to do. She said 3-6 months so I have some time but no time seems like enough. My limbs feel heavy and my head is full of clouds as I sit here watching these words appear on my screen in front of me. Is this even me? Everything feels unnatural like someone with my thoughts has inhabited my body and is controlling my fingers remotely. This I recognize as my dissociation and I’m almost grateful. If I’m not a part of my body these things can’t be happening to me. I should be happy for her that she is in a place to be independent and moving on from the sadness that she has lived through, but I can’t force myself to smile. I’ve come to rely on her presence, the steady calm that she represents. No matter what was going on I knew I’d have my apartment and my friend and things would be quiet inside. No more. All I can think about are all the opportunities I missed for being a better friend, one more fun and inclusive. My body image is so bad that I’ve declined to do things that I know she’d find fun. If only I could be happier, smile more, maybe she wouldn’t want to leave. Somewhere inside I know this isn’t true. She said she isn’t going for anything I’ve done but because she needs her life to move forward along her own path. It’s my own path that I fear for. I don’t know where it will be going now. It will diverge again and the end is an unknown. Who will have me now? How am I supposed to act knowing that she’s going to leave me too? I should be strong and put on a stoic face so she doesn’t feel bad for how upset I am. I shouldn’t let her know that all I want to do is scream that things keep changing and all I want is one thing to stay the same. That’s selfish and I should think of her. This is what I get for investing in people. Even when I try to save a part of myself it turns around and bites me. I held back and now she wants to leave. I thought I’d held back but really I need her more than I knew. I didn’t want to let her too close because she’d see all the bad in me but I guess it comes through anyways. I thought if I held back it wouldn’t hurt so much when she eventually decided to leave. Maybe it hurts less than it would have. In the end I had no real choice. No matter what I do, it still hurts. She was closer to me than almost anyone. I let myself believe. Now I see but not until I was blindsided. I feel like my heart is beating too slow to sustain me. What am I supposed to do?

I’m just one broken hearted girl. The world keeps on going. We all fall down.

What Dreams May Come?

Have you ever had dreams so vivid you woke up feeling as if you just stepped out of the things that took place? Worse, dreams consumed with people you have such conflicted feelings for you can’t extricate yourself from dwelling on the millions of paths a conversation with that person could take? All day I have been trying to write about what I wanted to write about today but my mind is consumed, obsessed, bogged down in the mire that was the subject of this dream. Him. I can’t help myself from having conversations with him my mind; what we’d say if we saw each other today; where else the dream could have gone; conversations as if we were still the kids we once knew each other to be. All conversations that will never happen and yet, I can’t not dwell on the possibilities. Consumed. Friend believes he may be the mask my inner demons take. What demons are trying to rise to the surface that I need face them in my subconscious because I cannot in my waking life? I wonder. What’s worse is the insidious nature of such dreams. They are never clean cut and angry to bring closure to some past wrong. No. They are full of unexpressed sentiment, gentle and cloying, that makes me question motives and sincerity, his, but worse, my own.

Why won’t the mind let go? Why after so many years will these sentiments still not leave me in peace? Is this everyone? Or just the mind of someone once obsessed? Are there things left to be learned here? I have moved on, but the past still lingers, haunting. It can never be fully exorcised but maybe there are lessons learned there that are still relevant for now.

For as painful as some memories are, perhaps it is prudent not to  simply bury them so deep and closeted away, but to delve into the insight that they could bring to more pressing problems?

So I sit here. Stuck. Mired in my memories. It is clear that I cannot simply walk away. The past can always find you. Where I go from here is the choice. Where,  indeed.