Monday. 01.04:
Discordia | dream inside the dream
But then he was with me, alive and sweet, apologetic for having died but he kept reassuring me that it hadn’t been my fault, that we could be happy now together. We were opening all the boxes I’d packed away, finding books, finding shirts wrapped around vases—There’s my summer shirt!—laughing in love and disbelief, the nagging undercurrent: how can we manage this, how can we make this work when it’s not real, but it is real, he’s right here, he came back to me; it’s not like last time when I would dream of David coming back, disappointed and upset that I’d sold so much of his furniture (even though he’d told me to do that if I had to, and I had to, I had to get out of that house and start again somewhere), it’s not like that at all, and I’m marveling at our luck, and I’m worrying about Sadie but he says she’s fine, she stays with another couple sometimes, two women who love her and feed her, she’s happy with them; we’re in the back yard and it’s fall, the garden has come in, still so many tomatoes, the kale is tremendous and his truck, his red truck is parked beneath a towering arbor of scuppernong grapes, they’ve fallen and pelted the truck, they’ve stained it, they’ve covered it, I’m laughing and wiping mashed grapes from the hood, What are we going to do with these?, and I swipe the windshield and there, inside, in the passenger seat, is his body, his face turned away, his skin old newspaper, his arms locked around an old duffel, I’m so sorry, I’m moaning, I’m crying on a bed in an old hotel, it’s Puebla, the door is open and someone is across the hall—is it Lois? Is it Wendy?—and I wail facedown into the pillows, half-smothering, and then Sadie is in the room, she’s licking my elbow, shoveling her sweet face under my arm, get up, Daddy, get up.
Woke from a complicated dream about R, so layered with detail and emotion that I believed it, I believed his death had been an error he’d somehow managed to come back from, both he and Sadie with me. Does anyone talk about the recurring loss of being fooled by the mind and heart into believing the partner’s death was the dream—and then being pulled from each other yet again upon waking? And the dream’s message: who is reassuring whom?
Tried to write as much as I could remember on the laptop, then posted it to my neglected blog. I don’t know who’s reading it anymore—I post so infrequently—but it’s important for me to put it out there, though I realize this gesture is an attempt to overcome, reach beyond, the terribly insular bubble of loneliness that surrounds me.
And the irony is that, as much as anything else, it was loneliness that killed R. And I have to bear my part of the responsibility for this. That he was incapable of overcoming such loneliness, incapable of making deeper, sustaining friendships or finding significant connection with others through friendship or sex (though I don’t want to go into that right now)—this is not my fault, though as weeks and months pass with no contact here, I feel more and more acutely a sense of what he must have felt. The difference, of course, is that I was in the next room. And oh, where is R now?
The envelope: the days between R’s passing and D’s passing. Pushing through curtain after heavy curtain.
On the way home from Loveland, four vehicles waiting ahead of me at the light at the bottom of the hill. Directly in front of me, R’s truck: red Chevy S-10.
Reads in the Trees 