Dreaming

This entire weekend I have spent in mourning. I miss B with an intensity that I frequently experience, but only in very small doses. These past few days I've been flooded with the aching loss of him. I'm mourning the lost years.

It makes sense that I should then dream so often about his father. Last night it was again the usual story, that M and I were going to get back together. But with a twist. I was on the phone--in a giant selling-all-things store like Costo or Walmart (in which, curiously, X, a woman whose divorce and career more or less coincides with my own, but who has become a much more prolific and well-known scholar, was working)--to my sister. I was telling her that M and I had gotten engaged. "What?" she squawked at me. "You can't do that! He was horrible to you!" I wanted her to be wrong but knew she was right. What I longed to do was fall back into sleep, into the fantasy that at last my loneliness would come to an end, and that M would love and treat me kindly. My sister brought be back to the truth, that he had been incredibly cruel to me, that his family had cut me away from them and left me to die.

Considering this, I turned to him and said, "You were horrible to me. You hurt me really badly. It was terrible what you did and said to me when we were breaking up." He responded gruffly. "You deserved it." He would not apologize for hurting me. He would not acknowledge that he had hurt me.

I realized that I was still under his power, and that life with him would be like living in a blizzard. In fact, I could not see that I could not see, that I was standing on a hillside or mountain slope engulfed in snow and darkness and cold. I was dying.

My grandmother FRL, was there. She had been hoping that would return to M and find happiness with him, but now she, too, could see that I could not see, that I was still crippled--literally, and she or someone was stitching it up.

The dark clouds, the snow and ice that surrounded me, I understood, were M's malevolence against me. What I needed to do was to visualize sunlight and color; I had somehow to exercise my own power to drive the darkness away. But I was weak, and lonely, and cold. Too weak to survive. It came to me then: I had to appeal to my grandmother, who represented my entire family. She would cover me with blankets and bring me food. She could extend her trip to me (she had bought a ticket) for a few more days, long enough for me to recover from my knee injury. She would clothe me and feed me until I could walk again.

And then the clouds began to dissipate, and the sun to shine, at first wanly and intermittently, but the hills were green again and it was growing warmer. M's father was there, and he was telling me to stay off my leg for two more days--so I wouldn't be able to go to the gym. This upset me because I need to work out every day in order to keep my mind at peace. When I don't keep to my regime, as I haven't for the past two days, I seem to fall into weeping and loneliness. I begin to think--or thoughts come into my mind, and despair, and I wonder what the last seven years of sacrifice have been for. Why have I spent the last seven years in the libray, in isolation, in loneliness, separated from my only child, in whose company alone I feel whole?

But I awoke and realized that my legs were whole and that I could get my workout after all.