15.06.09.08.07.

This morning I dreamt that you were standing in a large almost empty room. I was standing there, nearby, with my Father. He treated you with as much anger and contempt as I am now feeling for you. He pushed you down; there was a surge of violence in my breast. A dream of you is not usual. It is as if now I have attempted to banish you from my waking thought, you have crept in to my sleeping hours. And the only one there with me trying to help me to feel less in love with someone unworthy is someone who has so often been unworthy himself. Our only defence against you was school yard violence.

I have only dreamed of you once before. I was sad in this dream, terribly sad. The kind of sad which prohibits that satisfaction felt in fat warm tears, the kind of tears that leave trails of salt that dry and pull on the skin when you rearrange your face from sadness to spent contentment. This is the kind of breathless sad that keeps one’s legs twitching long after the light has been turned out, the kind of sad that is a silent scream, not an audible sob. In this dream, you took me into your arms and waltzed with me, through the icy cold stillness of my sadness, ignoring the dead weight of my feet. And I told you of it, and you sneered. You see my feet. You ignore no one’s inability to be weightless, and you told me how unlikely it was that you would ever dance with me. You reminded me that you could be nice, though. Unspoken was the pledge to never give any of that to me.

My Father once told me about a dream he had about me. There was a small black and white cat, lost, without a caretaker. I took it in for a while but it ran away and I could not make it come back. My Father seemed delighted that he had dreamed of me and that in this dream I was so charming. That in his dreams I was someone who saves alley cats. He told me like it was a secret, something to be kept from everyone else.

I don’t know what made me try to take you in, or why I stopped expecting you to stop running away.