Awoke to a big storm, dreampt of Melissa, and thought the cat was outside (and couldn't find her).
Created: 2023-04-15
|
On Our Own
- I awoke to a rather definitive racket and flashing of lightening and thunder. With the lightening hitting close and loud. (Like the train tracks, or docks/houses a hundred hards away). At least a few good strikes that close. AND LOUD! How very "welcome to Tax day"... (I'd filed an extension this year).
- I don't usually remember dreams as they aren't usually significant/memorable -- but I'd been lightly dreaming of just doing weekly chores with Melissa. I haven't been doing a lot of that typical pining for my ex wife in my dreams, as my psyche seems to fundamentally understand that she is gone and I have to keep going forward. Even this fealt more like I was reminiscing about it than it happening in the present -- just nostalgic, "remember how happy you were with the mundane?" Yeah, thanks. I can both be happy now and living in the moment, and still miss that. I wonder if that's just subconcious guilt that I'm slowly grinding forward without her, and packing traces of her away, or just the randomness of dreams.
- Then I had a flash of panic? I'd been letting the cat out during the day on the back deck, where's Zen? I'd been setting timers to bring her back in; wouldn't forget her outside? Would I? I'd gone to bed a little earlier, and don't remember her sitting with me on the couch. Of course with lightening and rain, she wasn't answering calls; not that cats are ever particularly urgent in responding. So I hunted the house and the back deck with a flashlight in my sleepy-boxers. Finally finding her hiding underneath the spare bedroom bed, and not coming out with all that noise going on. Whew. I wondered if cat hunting in the rain, and the terror of forgetting to do something I should have, was some sort of unconcious metaphor for my life now. Nobody to back me up, or remind me when I was wrong/forgetting something. Or just a sleep addled brain, not quite function right after being shaken out of REM sleep + NyQuil stupor.
- Melissa loved pictures (and was OK with more visual noise and trinkets than my more sterile/zen aesthetic), so the house is covered in them. After the memorial visitors leave, I'm reminded that I going to have a serious culling/boxing. They don't really trigger me, and I will keep a few around (not erasing 32 years of my life), especially ones with family and us. But the home can't remain a temple to my late wife's memories. Life goes on, and I want to just be able to look around without being slapped in the face by ghosts; dead parents, dead grandparents that raised me, late wife. This place need at least 2/3rds less morgue feel. I'd bought some sterile ironwork decorator pieces at a garage sale yesterday, to replace the wedding photos and cuddly picture of us that assaults you whenever I open the front or garage door.
🔗 More
| |
Tags: Grief
