It’s 2:30 in the morning. It wasn’t until about 1:40 that I was finally able to fall asleep. Legs felt like they needed to stretch and while I could feel my body was tired, I could not fall asleep. Less than an hour in and I woke from another terrible dream.
There was nothing unusual about the day that had me stressed or or would have kept me up. I was reading and writing on and off most of the day. I took some time to make a nice pasta sauce for dinner. Later in the night I re-read a bunch of my poems and made a few minor tweaks. I’m getting closer and closer to sending them out (either to some writer friends or just out for publication). I’m at over thirty – the book I’m reading has thirty-two. Almost ready for launch. I want to get some feedback, because I feel like I’m being lazy (or careless) with my line breaks and because I’m worried that I’m a tad overconfident and delusional on the quality. I suppose some rejection slips could take care of that. I was also looking at notes I had written the other night. I was trying to describe the sensation of forgetting what someone’s voice sounds like. I started working that in to a poem that incorporated and article I read about how to mend a broken heart by using “negative reappraisal.” The poem took a few turns as I also tried to incorporate the line “after the morning clarities” which sent me on a stanza about what my morning routine in Philly used to be like. I made the mistake of wanting to hear that lost voice and listened to an old voice mail – something I hadn’t done until now. I only had two voice mails from my ex-fiancee, B. One from about two weeks after we met and she was teasing me about falling asleep before she called and said she was just calling to say goodnight. The other one was from about a month before she left. She was calling to say that she was taking the bus to 25th with a sweet sounding “meet me if you want to.” When the timing worked out, I liked to meet he at her bus stop to walk home together – sometimes I brought Zelle too. All of those things (the voice mail and the morning routine) are the opposite of negative reappraisal…. the fact is, I didn’t live in some idealized fantasy world. I was well-aware of some of our struggles, but our everyday little moments were all the things you would want in a relationship, and for me to paint it any other way just feels like I would be being dishonest.
As for the dream…. In it, I had woken up in the morning and walked out in to the living room and dining room area. I saw a puke stain and started to clean it up. Then I saw another, and then another. They were all over the place and were already drying and dark brown. I started talking to myself (as if I were talking to my cat Nick). Kinda angry. “what the hell happened here? Why is there so much puke everywhere?” At the sound of my voice Nick came crawling out. I hadn’t really noticed that the apartment looked as though there had been a fight. Nick was missing his hind legs and his tail had been torn off. Some of what I thought was puke was blood. I got down on the floor to pet him and he started to purr. I felt horrible. Horrible for being mad. Horrible to see him like that. Horrible that he was purring to make me happy when he was in such pain. I woke up before he died – I didn’t need to continue the dream to know how it ended. I went out to the sofa to see my buddy and pet him. Aside from wondering what I was doing out there, he seemed happy to have the company and started to purr.
I feel like I could really use a solid night of sleep – one in which I don’t wake up with the gut punch of loss.