tl;dr

i had a dream last night that was so unnerving all i could think about when i woke up was writing it down. someone i didn't know in real life but loved dearly in my head died in my arms. and it wasn't really just that, it was the before and after that was the kicker. and all the ridiculous shit between that makes up your dreams. i'm mostly writing it down just to remember. because everyone knows you forget that shit in about 30 minutes.

actually, two people died, but one came back to life without me realizing it. strange, innit?

the first one was a roommate, and tbh he looked like your average hipster. tall, brown haired, black rimmed glasses. and we were close enough to be siblings, and maybe in the dream at some point we were, and for some reason i feel like his name was bill, but when i tried to remember later after he died, his name was irant. (wtf?) something with a bathroom. (??) and then the sudden knowledge that he was sick, and that everyone in the building (hundreds) was taking tickets to see him, and me rushing to go but dragging my feet, knowing he was upstairs in our apartment-within-a-museum-building with such little time.

and going and going, through white stairs that i thought led up but instead would plop me on the second hand of a giant clock statue, going around but never up. thinking about what to say, and holding out my ticket to be let up and being told that it wasn't valid by professor thomas, that lady IRL who pretty much got me into grad school. psychoanalysis time! jk. whereupon i burst into tears and she let me through.

i got up there after going down a series of steps and it was all a blur, and when i got there i said, i love you, i love you, we'll make coffee again soon, because that's what we did sometimes, in the quiet mess of our hardwood floored apartment, and then he was gone. it was so confusing and intangible, like a camera angle set purposely too close so as to be aesthetically uncomfortable to the viewer and to make you wish the director would zoom out so you could just see the big picture, and he was so tall in my arms, and then he was gone.

and i went back down the stairs that had changed into the winding castle things you see in a tower, suddenly sitting on a purple box that allowed me to fight bad guys. c'mon, it's a dream, it has to be weird sometimes. the purple box, for some reason, was him. i can't explain it, really.

but where everything before was adrenaline and desperation and dread, everything after was grief. it's hard to describe just how uninhibitedly we feel things in dreams. everything seems fuller, and bluer, and more overwhelming, and just more. everything more, because in the same way the environment subscribes only to the limits of our imagination, so too do the feelings subscribe only to the limits of our capacity to feel (which is to say, ignoring rationality and logic).

grief permeated everything. everything was changed; grief was in me, of me, and it was an unbearable thing that had to be endured. the lite brites didn't work. the crib's 'stay safe' was in the background. strangely enough, i was on the internet blogging about it. only the URL said properlylost.blogspot.com, and i have no idea whose that is.
oh wait, just checked it, nevermind, it's a poetry blog i sometimes go to.

but anyway. i could go on, about how tenuous the will to live became. only in dreams it's not weakness, it's... it's just the sheer magnitude of feeling. but any more descriptions about it just don't adequately convey it, they never will be able to. i woke up with a wet face, like i had been wrenched out of a life that wasn't mine. like i had been stolen unrightfully in the same way he seemed to have been.

in retrospect, i suppose it was appropriate. when we were together, i felt warm and everything was easy.
but anyway, i went back to sleep and had a dream about tubing on the chattahoochee that one time, and squirrels that were paid in nuts to let me use the shower. i think the nuts were simultaneously oysters or something...

fuck dreams. fuck everything about dreams.
they make you lose people you've never known.
and the loss is so real.