Sometimes I have this lucid dream where I'm living a completely different life. It doesn't feel warm to me. I'm in some poorly decorated city apartment with an uninspired IKEA print of a bridge hanging over the couch. I hate that painting because I like original art. Pieces that are alive with colour. Pieces that make me feel something. But I can't take it down because I don't feel at home here. And I don't feel all that safe. Like the thought police are coming. Like my feelings don't matter. Like I'm muzzled. And yet, for some reason I'm stuck here. I'm rifling in my purse digging out coins for the shared laundry. I'm rearranging the messy bookshelf into categories and themes: classic lit and contemporary and every genre in between. Classic OCD. Classic me, trying to make something beautiful and aesthetically pleasing out of something unfixable, out of something that is haphazardly tossed together without meaning or reason.
I'm not where I belong. I'm entertaining the self-absorbed dreams of some other man while ceasing to chase after my own. Like a meek and passive housewife. Gaslit and gorgeous and just an object to be admired, unseen. The man can't express himself well. He suffers from selective mutism and there are icy chasms in his chest and there's too much silence and I don't hear the giggles of my children in the next room over. It feels lifeless and cold. It feels vanilla. But when I wake up, I try to jump back in just to see what it meant. Just to understand what I'm doing there.
Turns out it means nothing at all. It was just this empty dream. All my anxieties were for nothing. I'm relieved, because it allows me to see all the passion, the life, it was always here in the present moment. It was always in the chaos of little feet and youthful adventures and late night fireside chats and a love that was forged in real time over a period of 27 years. No prepackaged formulas or checked boxes, no right swipes. No hesitations. No closed off hearts. Just an all encompassing, unconditional love. I wake up with the understanding that the dream wasn't real, even though it felt like it for a minute. And I am grateful for that.
excellent! wow has it really been 27 years?