Days 0730 & 0731

Sleep has texture.

At its best, sleep is like whalebone corduroy – soft, wide ridges and valleys, velvety and rich, and leaving the wearer looking slightly dorky.

At its worst, sleep is macrame or – for those never forced to macrame a plant pot holder in 1970s primary school – a cable knit sweater. Twisted and turned in on itself, this kind of sleep is disjointed and anything but smooth. It’s the kind of sleep you have when you have to catch a flight at 5am.

And then there is the sleep of jello, or that foam that molds to your shape and surrounds you. The sleep of the sleeping pulled. I don’t like that sleep. As necessary as it can sometimes be, it’s like losing some time from your life. And you don’t wake up revitalized so much as crusty. It’s a mechanical sleep – empty and cold. A necessity rather than an experience.

Days 0653 & 0654

I wish there could be a sense of peace about Halfman, but there just so is not.

Even now, when I can see his strangely toe-down step on the sidewalk ahead of me and think ‘ugh. ick. ick. ick. how did I ever?’ etc, I still feel an unending and hot anger at that thing. And I don’t mean the thing he did — I mean that being (calling Halfman a ‘him’ or a ‘person’ literally still chokes me — I can’t make those words come out in reference to Halfman; because I don’t consider them true or accurate). I have managed to refer to it by it’s Name once or twice, but only once or twice. People have names: Halfman is Halfman.

But it puzzles why it should be so.

Why I should still feel such anger at Halfman. Such anger, that when I do catch those glimpses behind my middle finger as I drive by Halfman’s path during the work week, it pops out in my dreams that night.

In the moment, the anger spikes, I laugh a little at myself and keep moving.

In the wee hours, when my eyes are all a flicker beneath my closed lids, I confront that thing. Most recently in a leaky boat. I was the captain, I knew that thing and his wife needed to get somewhere. And I declared I would take her but not Halfman, and proceeded to sail away without that thing in the boat, bailing the whole time, feeling like I’d rescued his spouse.

And then there’s the one where I saw Halfman in the front row of some public event. And–totally out of character–went right up and told him exactly what I thought of his Halfmanself for all to hear. I was rather pleased with the limited vocab I exhibited: colourful and heartfelt. And wholly accurate.

But I awoke wondering why? Why, when I am quite sure he has moved onto the next sex doll. When I am certain he has had no insight into that murky place in there. When I am sure Halfman does not yet even admit to himself what he did to me.

Maybe that’s the bit that sticks in my craw (do I have a craw?).

That I know there is some Halfman woven story he told his wife to minimise the truth and relieve himself of whatever amount of that truth he could keep from her–and I know he believes this story. That he doesn’t even acknowledge inside himself where no one else can see, that he did such a cataclysmically unkind thing to a person he said was his friend.

Days 0604 & 0605

Are dreams the mind’s detritus or do they reveal your deepest thoughts?

This question posed by a great podcast (Wiretap – find it here) got me thinking about all the silliness and decidedly *not* silliness of the dreams that ooze and zip around my brain.

For years and years I had recurring dreams that I was being bitten by vampires and couldn’t scream.

Then, when my first long-term relationship was going all to shite, I had recurring dreams that I was being buried alive.

I still have recurring dreams that I can’t open my eyes and look directly at people.

When I change antidepressants (which has happened a few times), I get extremely violent dreams where I am crushing people’s heads with jagged rocks and bricks. I have woken up from these horrific dreams with the smell of blood in my nose.

And, of course, I have those dreams that lead to total embarrassment where somehow I end up having sex with someone who I am totally not attracted to but who I inevitably bump into early the next morning in real life.

In some ways I am hoping all that is detritus and yet …

Day 0474

Timing can be everything.
There are things you dream of having in life, in spite of your realistic outlook, your tendency for logic; things you wish for and which something deep inside craves.
Sometimes the opportunity never arrives: you never get the chance to grab and embrace those sought after things. And there is an emptiness from that: a quiet sadness.
But then there are the times that opportunity and chance and an unexpected miracle happens and suddenly there it is. The thing you wished for and had to consider lost.
But the time is not right; the circumstances are not just wrong they’re completely fucked up and though your body wants that opportunity with every cell, your brain, your heart, even your gut knows it just cannot be.
The right choice is made.
And life goes on, improved somehow by letting the opportunity go.
But there is a profound sadness left behind in that space, one filled with gentle dreams and hot tears.
No regrets; none of that. Just loss.

Day 0447

Is it possible that long term relationships are just continual wishful thinking that never gets shattered? That two wishful thinkers get together and spend their time thinking in an unreal way?
I’ve been thinking about what is the hardest part of a relationship to get over.
Stay with me; it’s on the same continuum.
The hardest part of saying goodbye to a relationship is letting go of dreams – they may not even have been fully formed; just some romantic story that you vaguely thought you were heading towards. But letting go of that part; the dream of a happy, life long marriage; the dream of trusting someone implicitly to give themselves to you body and soul; the dream of having someone to care for you in a foreign land far from home …
I’m quite sure that sort of dreaming is what left me working at my dreadful marriage for two years of relationship counselling. The reality and the wishful thinking were not even parallel lines – they diverged too greatly.
And I remember saying to Halfman when he asked what expectations I had for our relationship: No expectations; lots of dreams.
I was honest, at least.
Could I live in a bubble of wishful thinking for decades?
I suspect so; and I suspect I’d be happy enough as long as the bubble never got popped by reality.
I certainly couldn’t rebuild the bubble, once it had collapsed all over my face.

Day 0322

Just had a conversation about how people – and women in particular in this case – will fall for what can only be fantasy and lies because they are lonely enough they’d rather pretend the impossible is true.

And it made me think how I basically did the same thing when it came to Halfman.

I mean, ok, he wasn’t asking me to send him cash to his bank account in Nigeria, or to hold some money for him while he gets ready to build his orphanage in Romania, but still, with some distance, what he was asking and offering me was highly improbable.

So I kind of sighed at the ‘stupidity’ of the woman who fell for the Nigerian love scandal.

But I’m really not allowed.

Because I let myself have the same fantasy: that someone was willing to change their lives for me. And the flip side as well: I was enough to make someone want to do something Really Big.

I now laugh scoffingly at myself.

Silly, silly woman.

I am smart, learned, thoughtful and … lonely.

And that is maybe what makes me vulnerable; not the idealism and belief in the good of people and my willingness to be dreamy. Maybe those really are all good things, good characteristics.

And maybe, once I’ve learned that being On My Own doesn’t make me Lonely in the slightest (I’m already making progress on that one), then I won’t be so vulnerable to wild and crazy schemes like:

I’ve fallen for you and I love you when they’re accompanied by ‘but I only have an hour’ and ‘we’re separated’.

Day 0305

I had a dream last night that you came to see me at my office.

You sat down. I was polite.

You started with an apology. I said ‘thank you’ and started to feel relieved — like 10000000 tonnes weight off my shoulders relieved.

And then you started trying to convince me that your lies had all been my fault. You went on and on, quietly and gently as is your way.

And my sleeping mind said: Enough. I don’t need to listen to this pathetic spiel.

Angry words that I said to myself most unangrily.

And then I turned my dream off. And you were gone.

Days 0204 & 0205

I don’t think it’s love that is blind.

I think it is loneliness that makes us blind in love: makes being cared about and paid attention to an end, a beauty, in and of itself.

So we make stupid mistakes, because even when we’re not with that person who is the focus, we can at least fill the lonely times with thoughts and dreams and anticipation of that person. 

And then we begin to mistake those dream times for reality.

Even when being with the beloved one actually makes us feel lonely.

It is the dream that we prefer.

That has long been my mistake anyway. If I could live in dreamed relationships, I would be a happier person. Real people just end up giving me the shits.