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sonreirThat Thing
When I jolt awake at 3AM, my first thought isn't, "what a horrible dream" or "oh God, not again", but "where did I leave the notebook?"
I sit up and flip on the bedside light, trying not to lose the threads of the dream. I've gotten good, over the years, at remembering them, but this was worse than usual, much more detailed, and I don't want to let it go.
The black composition book I record everything in is in the nightstand drawer, just where I left it. There's a ballpoint pen tucked between its pages, marking my place.
I crack it open, suddenly perversely glad that Joe is away on business this week -- I don't have to move to the kitchen to write everything down. I can capture all the details just as I remember them.
I write the date at the top of the page, underline it. "Subject: divorce," I pen underneath it.
I take a moment to organize my thoughts, breathe. It hasn't happened yet, I tell myself, and then I begin to write.
Mom called it "that thing". Not "the curse" or "the gift", or whatever the YA fantasy books I read (always hoping they would come close to the truth, that they'd be able to give me some kind of insight) called it.
That thing.
She told me about it, around the time I was eleven. My parents had just gone through a divorce, and after the dust had settled, after the house had been sold and we'd gotten the new routine nailed down, whose house I was at which weekend, I'd started waking in the night from screaming nightmares that something had happened to Dad.
Mom comforted me through the first one. "Shh, it's not real."
She was lying, but I don't think she knew it then.
When the dreams kept repeating, getting more and more detailed -- when Dad called her, wringing his hands about what to do -- Mom sat me down and talked to me.
"Some of the people in our family are special," she started, and hesitated. "They have, um, a special thing about them."
She explained everything -- about dreams and prophecy, and what we couldn't and couldn't do.
"Things will never turn out just the way they did in your dream. You'll rarely get more than a little bit of insight into what it is that's about to happen. Maybe a snippet, maybe a part of a conversation that's going to happen later. It won't be useful, usually. Sometimes the best thing to do is to ignore it and move on."
I listened to her, tried to follow her advice.
The dreams continued, increasing in intensity. It went from something had happened to Dad, to he was dead, and I was at the funeral. I could tell what I wore -- a black dress I'd never seen before, and black Mary Janes -- and that I was taller. Mom was there, too, and she looked...older. There were streaks of gray in her brown hair, and new lines on her face.
This is the future, I thought, in the dream. It hasn't happened yet.
"Such a shame," said the people, standing around an unfamiliar church. "He was so young."
I tried to ask, what happened?
I woke up every time, always convinced that it was real. They were so vivid. I could smell the scent of the flowers, the wreathes that were around the closed casket. I could feel the hands of strangers and relatives, clasping mine, telling me they were so sorry for my loss, and hear my own dull reply: "Thank you for your condolences."
I stopped waking up screaming every time I had the dream -- but that didn't mean it went away.
"Stress from the divorce," I overheard Dad say to my grandmother on the phone one night, a few months after I'd started having it. "The therapist says she'll outgrow it, once everything is settled."
I didn't tell him about prophecy and telling the future -- I erred on the side of trying to convince him to take care of himself. I resented the implication that it was baseless fear. It wasn't, and I knew it, but I couldn't tell him. I never did.
"The problem with that thing," Mom said, carefully, "is that no one believes you until it's too late. It's always that you're a pessimist or that you worry too much. That's why you have to let it go. Don't tell anyone about it. Don't try to remember your dreams. Let it go."
I started pushing them out of my mind, making an effort to forget as soon as I woke up.
It worked, in a sense -- I could remember the dreams, but I couldn't remember what was in them.
I was sixteen, a high school junior sitting in French class, when one of the office aides came into the classroom and handed a pink slip to our teacher, Mrs. Fraiser.
"Cassie," she said, calling me up. "It's for you."
I walked to the front of the class and took it from her, and as I did, I remembered a dream I'd had, a few nights before. A snippet: I was sitting in class when something happened, and I had to leave. I'd packed up all of my things and walked down to the office, and Mom was waiting there.
I tried to remember other details, whether it was a happy dream (had Mom just won the lottery?), or a sad one.
I glanced at the slip. Written on the bottom was a note that I wouldn't be returning to class that day.
I gathered my things with a strong sense of deja vu, walked down to the main office.
I pressed down on the door handle, and it was like I was right back in the dream again. I could remember the details, this is something terrible.
I stepped inside, my heart pounding in my ears. My mother was sitting in one of the chairs across from the front desk, hands clutching the arms of it, her knuckles white.
"Cassandra, honey," she said, as I walked inside. "I'm so sorry."
I knew, before Mom said anything, that Dad was dead -- had died in a car accident on the way to the construction site he was supervising.
That was the first time.
Dad was the big one, maybe because he was the first, or maybe because I was so young when I first had the dream -- I didn't know to block them out.
The funeral went just the way I had dreamed it. I bought the dress at Target, found shoes there too. Mom talked about going somewhere more expensive to buy an outfit, but I wasn't up for facing the department stores, with their sales associates that tried to give helpful suggestions. Target felt nicely impersonal.
The relatives at the funeral all offered their condolences. None of us talked about what had happened. We kept the casket closed and didn't say anything.
Mom stood by me, the entire time. If anyone wanted to say anything -- how strange it was that his ex-wife was there -- they kept their mouths shut. Their divorce hadn't been particularly contentious. They hadn't worked as spouses, but they worked as co-parents, and Dad had never disparaged her to the family.
My grandma asked if I wanted to deliver part of the eulogy.
"No," I said, because I couldn't imagine what I would say.
So I stood off to the side, away from the cloying scent of the roses and lilies that surrounded the casket, and accepted hugs from strangers and near-strangers as they came, just like in my dream.
In the car, on the way to the cemetery, I asked Mom: "Is it like this every time?"
Her knuckles tightened on the wheel. She didn't seem to need to ask what the "it" was that I referred to.
"No," she said, after a long moment. "Usually it's not anything big, or you get the details wrong."
I never wondered how she knew that I hadn't.
Dad was the big one, the first one. The rest were small.
I dreamed about senior prom before it happened, and knew who my date would be before we even had a class together.
A dream told me what colleges I would get into.
I knew when my first serious boyfriend was going to ask me out, and again when he was going to break up with me. I could tell, before he did, that he'd lost interest in me. We talked about moving in, and I had a dream, that night, about moving my things out of his apartment, a box of my belongings on the passenger seat of my car.
"I don't think I'm ready for that step," I told him, because I wasn't. We'd been dating a year, and moving in felt like a last-ditch effort to fix the mounting problems between us.
"If you don't want to move in with me, then what are we even doing?" he asked, pointedly -- and that initiated the breakup, the subsequent walk down to my car with all of the random belongings I'd lent him or left at his apartment in a box, which I placed onto the passenger seat of my car. When I drove home, the "I've seen this before" feeling felt like a victory.
That thing kept me informed about what was going to happen. Big things and small things, important and unimportant.
I never got more than snippets, the way Mom warned me, but the snippets were enough. I had an idea; that was enough.
I could predict my future, and so I could control it.
Mom got wind of what I was doing -- a dream told her, I guessed, or she'd seen that I looked a little too unsurprised when Brent broke up with me.
"You have to stop," she said. "The dreams, they're not..."
I waited for her to finish. When she didn't, I leaped in: "I'm not basing everything on them. They're just...informing the important things."
"You don't get enough information to inform anything," she said grimly. "Let things happen how they're supposed to. Go with your own feelings. Don't depend on that thing to tell you what you need to know."
"I don't," I assured her.
She eyed me, warily. "Fine."
I kept Mom's advice in the back of my mind. I didn't ignore her, but I didn't stop listening to the dreams, either.
Had the one about Dad not been so detailed, I might have been willing to let go -- to leave everything to fate. It had been, though, and in a perverse way, it had prepared me. I had known that something was going to happen. I'd never known what, and so it had made me prepare: spending time with him whenever I got the chance, making sure he knew that I cared about him, never leaving the house without saying, "I love you!" -- even if it made me cringe, inwardly, to do so.
When he died, and things proceeded according to the dream, I felt...prepared. Not okay, never okay, but ready. What I'd been waiting for had happened. All I had to do was live through it and follow out the actions the dreams had laid out for me.
Mom told me to stop listening. "That thing's not good for you," she told me, glumly.
I wanted to ask her how she knew, tease her about what dreams she was listening to. I knew better, though.
"Okay," I told her, and I pretended that I had stopped paying attention to the dreams.
She never believed me.
"Life is supposed to be full of surprises," she lectured me -- but it was. I didn't know when things would happen, only that they were going to. I was never quite sure what the circumstances would be, and I rarely got any insight into how to prepare for them. A dream about being caught in a downpour might remind me to check the forecast, but if the forecast didn't indicate rain, I wouldn't take an umbrella everywhere.
Some of them felt inevitable. I accepted this.
I didn't have any dreams about Joe, but that didn't affect how I felt about him. Rather, I took it as a good sign. Most of the dreams I'd had over the last few months had been negative. If I didn't dream about him, it meant that there was nothing negative about our relationship.
We clicked right away -- meeting at a mutual friend's party, and spending the entire night talking before swapping numbers. He was cute and easy-going, a sharp contrast to the last relationship I'd been in. We fell into it easily. By date four, I knew I was going to marry him. I didn't need a dream to tell me that.
I said "I love you" to him first, because I knew. I was as certain about him as I'd ever been about anything. "That thing" didn't interfere.
Mom was ecstastic. "See?" she told me, during one of our catch-up breakfasts. "I told you."
I pretended not to hear.
I dreamed that Joe was going to propose before he did. It bothered me, in a sense — the proposal in the dream was perfect, but seeing it took all the magic out of it.
When he pulled the ring out of his pocket, on the hike we took together, I had to feign surprise. We'd been talking about marriage for months, and I knew he'd been ring shopping, but the ring itself should have been a surprise, and it wasn't.
"Don't you like it?" he asked me, misunderstanding my lukewarm response.
"I love it," I told him. "You picked it out, and I love you."
Still, it was the first inkling that Mom might have been right.
I tried to turn it off, after that, quit trying to remember them, but it was a bit like trying to tune out a band playing in the same room. They were loud, and pervasive. Sometimes I'd wake in the night in a cold sweat, the same as when I was a kid, dreaming about my dad's death.
"How did you deal with that thing?" I asked Mom, feigning an ease I didn't feel.
She sighed heavily. "I stopped trying to remember my dreams."
"Did it work?"
"Mostly," she said. "But some of them you can't block out, so you'll still have to pretend to be surprised."
Joe and I got married, bought a house. I had dreams about both of these things -- pieces from the wedding reception, the house that we toured and eventually bought -- but I blocked them out, willful.
I tried to pretend that I was normal.
We'd been married three years when I started waking up with nightmares again. Bad ones, usually -- little flashes where one or both of us was in a bad car accident, the image of the car skidding into a tree playing in my mind over and over again, or where one or both of us was fired.
I tried to ignore them.
When that didn't work, I gave in, and started writing them down again. Joe was uneasy, at first -- he suggested that I see a therapist, talk about the sudden onset of anxiety that was keeping me up at night, but I refused.
"It's not anxiety," I told him. "I've always had bad dreams. Writing them down is part of the way I deal with it."
I didn't tell him about that thing. I didn't think he'd believe me. Mom had explicitly cautioned me against it -- don't talk to him about you-know-what, he won't believe you, your dad never did -- and I was all to happy to listen to her.
His job began sending him on business trips, often two or three days in a different city, meeting with clients across the state, and it was a relief, in a way -- I didn't have to worry about waking him, about what he must have thought as he lay awake in the dark waiting for me to come back to bed.
Somewhere in there, he stopped bothering me to go to therapy, stopped commenting on the notebook. I didn't think anything of this -- he didn't see it as often, because he was gone; our relationship was otherwise solid, I had no reason to believe that there was anything wrong.
I didn't have any dreams that would indicate otherwise.
I write the description of the dream, what had happened, in the notebook, and reason over what the context might be.
The only detail I can remember is Joe stating, very flatly, "I want a divorce." We were standing in our kitchen, in the dream, evidently in the middle of a conversation, and he said it. His expression was neutral -- surely a good sign, he doesn't really want to leave --
There is no lead-up, no other context. I try to think of what could lead to it -- what would possibly make sense and not mean what I fear -- and I come up with nothing.
I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering, until morning.
Joe gets back from his latest business trip at noon. It's Saturday; he promised that he'd come home and shower, and then we'd go out for lunch.
I hear his key on the lock, and I freeze. I'm siting at the kitchen table, sorting through recipes and planning meals for the week, and it occurs to me that the setting is the same as it was in the dream: I've seen this before.
"Hey hon," he says, as he walks in. He leans down to give me a quick kiss, and walks over to the fridge. "Do we have any milk?"
"How was your trip?" I ask, forcing myself to stay calm.
He pulls out the carton, pours himself a glass, and puts it back. "Fine, I guess."
His voice is hesitant. I can tell, even without the aid of the dream, that there's something on his mind.
I brace myself for the worst and ask: "Anything you want to talk about? Any news?"
It's not the question I'd normally ask, and he can tell -- he glances at me, alarmed.
"Who told you?" he blurts.
I close my eyes, shut out the sight of his face. If I don't see it, maybe...
"No one told me anything," I say. "You just seem...a little off."
He heaves a sigh. "Yeah, Mari and Ted are getting divorced."
I open my eyes, appraise him. Ted is his coworker, the one he makes most of these trips with. I know his wife, Mari, and I like her a lot. They have a solid marriage, or so I thought -- they've always seemed happy and in love, when I've seen them.
"What?"
"Yeah, she called him while we were on the road. I heard everything -- 'I want a divorce', and then something about how she hasn't been happy in a long time."
"Shit," I say, surprised. "That's...really awkward."
"Yeah," he agrees. "Uh -- are you okay?"
I'm crying -- I can't help myself. It's not what I thought, it's not what I thought...
"Yeah," I manage, after a second. "I'm just -- child of divorced parents, right? I always thought they were happy, too. I guess you can never tell."
If he thinks this is a weird non-answer, he doesn't say anything. He steps across the kitchen, leans down to envelop me in a hug. "Hey. It's okay."
"Yeah," I agree, "it is."
It's the dream I had, but it's not what I thought it was.
I wonder about the other dreams I've had, about how I intrepreted them, how I leaned into it, extrapolated from minute pieces of data to come up with a complete picture. I wonder about the men I've broken up with, the jobs I'd quit before I could be fired, the decisions I'd made, all based on that thing.
How much have I gotten wrong? How much have I missed out on, because I had a vague hint of what was to come -- not the full picture, never the full picture, but enough to affect things?
Joe holds me. "You're okay," he says, as I sob -- not about Ted and Mari, but about my own choices, the decisions I'd made, based in incomplete data, the fear that I've felt my entire adult life. "You're okay."
And, for all the grief, I am. I know I am. I know I'll be fine.
I also know I need to tell him.
Not now, but eventually. After the next dream, maybe.
"Everything is fine," he repeats, stroking my hair. "I love you."
Soon, I think. Aloud, I say, as though I did not spend the morning afraid of losing him: "I know, I know. I love you too."
~*~
I've always wondered what it would be like to be able to tell the future. Somehow I don't think it would be in complete, neat chunks, but little bits and pieces -- incomplete data that you have to work from.
This prompt gave me an excuse to explore that.
When I jolt awake at 3AM, my first thought isn't, "what a horrible dream" or "oh God, not again", but "where did I leave the notebook?"
I sit up and flip on the bedside light, trying not to lose the threads of the dream. I've gotten good, over the years, at remembering them, but this was worse than usual, much more detailed, and I don't want to let it go.
The black composition book I record everything in is in the nightstand drawer, just where I left it. There's a ballpoint pen tucked between its pages, marking my place.
I crack it open, suddenly perversely glad that Joe is away on business this week -- I don't have to move to the kitchen to write everything down. I can capture all the details just as I remember them.
I write the date at the top of the page, underline it. "Subject: divorce," I pen underneath it.
I take a moment to organize my thoughts, breathe. It hasn't happened yet, I tell myself, and then I begin to write.
Mom called it "that thing". Not "the curse" or "the gift", or whatever the YA fantasy books I read (always hoping they would come close to the truth, that they'd be able to give me some kind of insight) called it.
That thing.
She told me about it, around the time I was eleven. My parents had just gone through a divorce, and after the dust had settled, after the house had been sold and we'd gotten the new routine nailed down, whose house I was at which weekend, I'd started waking in the night from screaming nightmares that something had happened to Dad.
Mom comforted me through the first one. "Shh, it's not real."
She was lying, but I don't think she knew it then.
When the dreams kept repeating, getting more and more detailed -- when Dad called her, wringing his hands about what to do -- Mom sat me down and talked to me.
"Some of the people in our family are special," she started, and hesitated. "They have, um, a special thing about them."
She explained everything -- about dreams and prophecy, and what we couldn't and couldn't do.
"Things will never turn out just the way they did in your dream. You'll rarely get more than a little bit of insight into what it is that's about to happen. Maybe a snippet, maybe a part of a conversation that's going to happen later. It won't be useful, usually. Sometimes the best thing to do is to ignore it and move on."
I listened to her, tried to follow her advice.
The dreams continued, increasing in intensity. It went from something had happened to Dad, to he was dead, and I was at the funeral. I could tell what I wore -- a black dress I'd never seen before, and black Mary Janes -- and that I was taller. Mom was there, too, and she looked...older. There were streaks of gray in her brown hair, and new lines on her face.
This is the future, I thought, in the dream. It hasn't happened yet.
"Such a shame," said the people, standing around an unfamiliar church. "He was so young."
I tried to ask, what happened?
I woke up every time, always convinced that it was real. They were so vivid. I could smell the scent of the flowers, the wreathes that were around the closed casket. I could feel the hands of strangers and relatives, clasping mine, telling me they were so sorry for my loss, and hear my own dull reply: "Thank you for your condolences."
I stopped waking up screaming every time I had the dream -- but that didn't mean it went away.
"Stress from the divorce," I overheard Dad say to my grandmother on the phone one night, a few months after I'd started having it. "The therapist says she'll outgrow it, once everything is settled."
I didn't tell him about prophecy and telling the future -- I erred on the side of trying to convince him to take care of himself. I resented the implication that it was baseless fear. It wasn't, and I knew it, but I couldn't tell him. I never did.
"The problem with that thing," Mom said, carefully, "is that no one believes you until it's too late. It's always that you're a pessimist or that you worry too much. That's why you have to let it go. Don't tell anyone about it. Don't try to remember your dreams. Let it go."
I started pushing them out of my mind, making an effort to forget as soon as I woke up.
It worked, in a sense -- I could remember the dreams, but I couldn't remember what was in them.
I was sixteen, a high school junior sitting in French class, when one of the office aides came into the classroom and handed a pink slip to our teacher, Mrs. Fraiser.
"Cassie," she said, calling me up. "It's for you."
I walked to the front of the class and took it from her, and as I did, I remembered a dream I'd had, a few nights before. A snippet: I was sitting in class when something happened, and I had to leave. I'd packed up all of my things and walked down to the office, and Mom was waiting there.
I tried to remember other details, whether it was a happy dream (had Mom just won the lottery?), or a sad one.
I glanced at the slip. Written on the bottom was a note that I wouldn't be returning to class that day.
I gathered my things with a strong sense of deja vu, walked down to the main office.
I pressed down on the door handle, and it was like I was right back in the dream again. I could remember the details, this is something terrible.
I stepped inside, my heart pounding in my ears. My mother was sitting in one of the chairs across from the front desk, hands clutching the arms of it, her knuckles white.
"Cassandra, honey," she said, as I walked inside. "I'm so sorry."
I knew, before Mom said anything, that Dad was dead -- had died in a car accident on the way to the construction site he was supervising.
That was the first time.
Dad was the big one, maybe because he was the first, or maybe because I was so young when I first had the dream -- I didn't know to block them out.
The funeral went just the way I had dreamed it. I bought the dress at Target, found shoes there too. Mom talked about going somewhere more expensive to buy an outfit, but I wasn't up for facing the department stores, with their sales associates that tried to give helpful suggestions. Target felt nicely impersonal.
The relatives at the funeral all offered their condolences. None of us talked about what had happened. We kept the casket closed and didn't say anything.
Mom stood by me, the entire time. If anyone wanted to say anything -- how strange it was that his ex-wife was there -- they kept their mouths shut. Their divorce hadn't been particularly contentious. They hadn't worked as spouses, but they worked as co-parents, and Dad had never disparaged her to the family.
My grandma asked if I wanted to deliver part of the eulogy.
"No," I said, because I couldn't imagine what I would say.
So I stood off to the side, away from the cloying scent of the roses and lilies that surrounded the casket, and accepted hugs from strangers and near-strangers as they came, just like in my dream.
In the car, on the way to the cemetery, I asked Mom: "Is it like this every time?"
Her knuckles tightened on the wheel. She didn't seem to need to ask what the "it" was that I referred to.
"No," she said, after a long moment. "Usually it's not anything big, or you get the details wrong."
I never wondered how she knew that I hadn't.
Dad was the big one, the first one. The rest were small.
I dreamed about senior prom before it happened, and knew who my date would be before we even had a class together.
A dream told me what colleges I would get into.
I knew when my first serious boyfriend was going to ask me out, and again when he was going to break up with me. I could tell, before he did, that he'd lost interest in me. We talked about moving in, and I had a dream, that night, about moving my things out of his apartment, a box of my belongings on the passenger seat of my car.
"I don't think I'm ready for that step," I told him, because I wasn't. We'd been dating a year, and moving in felt like a last-ditch effort to fix the mounting problems between us.
"If you don't want to move in with me, then what are we even doing?" he asked, pointedly -- and that initiated the breakup, the subsequent walk down to my car with all of the random belongings I'd lent him or left at his apartment in a box, which I placed onto the passenger seat of my car. When I drove home, the "I've seen this before" feeling felt like a victory.
That thing kept me informed about what was going to happen. Big things and small things, important and unimportant.
I never got more than snippets, the way Mom warned me, but the snippets were enough. I had an idea; that was enough.
I could predict my future, and so I could control it.
Mom got wind of what I was doing -- a dream told her, I guessed, or she'd seen that I looked a little too unsurprised when Brent broke up with me.
"You have to stop," she said. "The dreams, they're not..."
I waited for her to finish. When she didn't, I leaped in: "I'm not basing everything on them. They're just...informing the important things."
"You don't get enough information to inform anything," she said grimly. "Let things happen how they're supposed to. Go with your own feelings. Don't depend on that thing to tell you what you need to know."
"I don't," I assured her.
She eyed me, warily. "Fine."
I kept Mom's advice in the back of my mind. I didn't ignore her, but I didn't stop listening to the dreams, either.
Had the one about Dad not been so detailed, I might have been willing to let go -- to leave everything to fate. It had been, though, and in a perverse way, it had prepared me. I had known that something was going to happen. I'd never known what, and so it had made me prepare: spending time with him whenever I got the chance, making sure he knew that I cared about him, never leaving the house without saying, "I love you!" -- even if it made me cringe, inwardly, to do so.
When he died, and things proceeded according to the dream, I felt...prepared. Not okay, never okay, but ready. What I'd been waiting for had happened. All I had to do was live through it and follow out the actions the dreams had laid out for me.
Mom told me to stop listening. "That thing's not good for you," she told me, glumly.
I wanted to ask her how she knew, tease her about what dreams she was listening to. I knew better, though.
"Okay," I told her, and I pretended that I had stopped paying attention to the dreams.
She never believed me.
"Life is supposed to be full of surprises," she lectured me -- but it was. I didn't know when things would happen, only that they were going to. I was never quite sure what the circumstances would be, and I rarely got any insight into how to prepare for them. A dream about being caught in a downpour might remind me to check the forecast, but if the forecast didn't indicate rain, I wouldn't take an umbrella everywhere.
Some of them felt inevitable. I accepted this.
I didn't have any dreams about Joe, but that didn't affect how I felt about him. Rather, I took it as a good sign. Most of the dreams I'd had over the last few months had been negative. If I didn't dream about him, it meant that there was nothing negative about our relationship.
We clicked right away -- meeting at a mutual friend's party, and spending the entire night talking before swapping numbers. He was cute and easy-going, a sharp contrast to the last relationship I'd been in. We fell into it easily. By date four, I knew I was going to marry him. I didn't need a dream to tell me that.
I said "I love you" to him first, because I knew. I was as certain about him as I'd ever been about anything. "That thing" didn't interfere.
Mom was ecstastic. "See?" she told me, during one of our catch-up breakfasts. "I told you."
I pretended not to hear.
I dreamed that Joe was going to propose before he did. It bothered me, in a sense — the proposal in the dream was perfect, but seeing it took all the magic out of it.
When he pulled the ring out of his pocket, on the hike we took together, I had to feign surprise. We'd been talking about marriage for months, and I knew he'd been ring shopping, but the ring itself should have been a surprise, and it wasn't.
"Don't you like it?" he asked me, misunderstanding my lukewarm response.
"I love it," I told him. "You picked it out, and I love you."
Still, it was the first inkling that Mom might have been right.
I tried to turn it off, after that, quit trying to remember them, but it was a bit like trying to tune out a band playing in the same room. They were loud, and pervasive. Sometimes I'd wake in the night in a cold sweat, the same as when I was a kid, dreaming about my dad's death.
"How did you deal with that thing?" I asked Mom, feigning an ease I didn't feel.
She sighed heavily. "I stopped trying to remember my dreams."
"Did it work?"
"Mostly," she said. "But some of them you can't block out, so you'll still have to pretend to be surprised."
Joe and I got married, bought a house. I had dreams about both of these things -- pieces from the wedding reception, the house that we toured and eventually bought -- but I blocked them out, willful.
I tried to pretend that I was normal.
We'd been married three years when I started waking up with nightmares again. Bad ones, usually -- little flashes where one or both of us was in a bad car accident, the image of the car skidding into a tree playing in my mind over and over again, or where one or both of us was fired.
I tried to ignore them.
When that didn't work, I gave in, and started writing them down again. Joe was uneasy, at first -- he suggested that I see a therapist, talk about the sudden onset of anxiety that was keeping me up at night, but I refused.
"It's not anxiety," I told him. "I've always had bad dreams. Writing them down is part of the way I deal with it."
I didn't tell him about that thing. I didn't think he'd believe me. Mom had explicitly cautioned me against it -- don't talk to him about you-know-what, he won't believe you, your dad never did -- and I was all to happy to listen to her.
His job began sending him on business trips, often two or three days in a different city, meeting with clients across the state, and it was a relief, in a way -- I didn't have to worry about waking him, about what he must have thought as he lay awake in the dark waiting for me to come back to bed.
Somewhere in there, he stopped bothering me to go to therapy, stopped commenting on the notebook. I didn't think anything of this -- he didn't see it as often, because he was gone; our relationship was otherwise solid, I had no reason to believe that there was anything wrong.
I didn't have any dreams that would indicate otherwise.
I write the description of the dream, what had happened, in the notebook, and reason over what the context might be.
The only detail I can remember is Joe stating, very flatly, "I want a divorce." We were standing in our kitchen, in the dream, evidently in the middle of a conversation, and he said it. His expression was neutral -- surely a good sign, he doesn't really want to leave --
There is no lead-up, no other context. I try to think of what could lead to it -- what would possibly make sense and not mean what I fear -- and I come up with nothing.
I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering, until morning.
Joe gets back from his latest business trip at noon. It's Saturday; he promised that he'd come home and shower, and then we'd go out for lunch.
I hear his key on the lock, and I freeze. I'm siting at the kitchen table, sorting through recipes and planning meals for the week, and it occurs to me that the setting is the same as it was in the dream: I've seen this before.
"Hey hon," he says, as he walks in. He leans down to give me a quick kiss, and walks over to the fridge. "Do we have any milk?"
"How was your trip?" I ask, forcing myself to stay calm.
He pulls out the carton, pours himself a glass, and puts it back. "Fine, I guess."
His voice is hesitant. I can tell, even without the aid of the dream, that there's something on his mind.
I brace myself for the worst and ask: "Anything you want to talk about? Any news?"
It's not the question I'd normally ask, and he can tell -- he glances at me, alarmed.
"Who told you?" he blurts.
I close my eyes, shut out the sight of his face. If I don't see it, maybe...
"No one told me anything," I say. "You just seem...a little off."
He heaves a sigh. "Yeah, Mari and Ted are getting divorced."
I open my eyes, appraise him. Ted is his coworker, the one he makes most of these trips with. I know his wife, Mari, and I like her a lot. They have a solid marriage, or so I thought -- they've always seemed happy and in love, when I've seen them.
"What?"
"Yeah, she called him while we were on the road. I heard everything -- 'I want a divorce', and then something about how she hasn't been happy in a long time."
"Shit," I say, surprised. "That's...really awkward."
"Yeah," he agrees. "Uh -- are you okay?"
I'm crying -- I can't help myself. It's not what I thought, it's not what I thought...
"Yeah," I manage, after a second. "I'm just -- child of divorced parents, right? I always thought they were happy, too. I guess you can never tell."
If he thinks this is a weird non-answer, he doesn't say anything. He steps across the kitchen, leans down to envelop me in a hug. "Hey. It's okay."
"Yeah," I agree, "it is."
It's the dream I had, but it's not what I thought it was.
I wonder about the other dreams I've had, about how I intrepreted them, how I leaned into it, extrapolated from minute pieces of data to come up with a complete picture. I wonder about the men I've broken up with, the jobs I'd quit before I could be fired, the decisions I'd made, all based on that thing.
How much have I gotten wrong? How much have I missed out on, because I had a vague hint of what was to come -- not the full picture, never the full picture, but enough to affect things?
Joe holds me. "You're okay," he says, as I sob -- not about Ted and Mari, but about my own choices, the decisions I'd made, based in incomplete data, the fear that I've felt my entire adult life. "You're okay."
And, for all the grief, I am. I know I am. I know I'll be fine.
I also know I need to tell him.
Not now, but eventually. After the next dream, maybe.
"Everything is fine," he repeats, stroking my hair. "I love you."
Soon, I think. Aloud, I say, as though I did not spend the morning afraid of losing him: "I know, I know. I love you too."
~*~
I've always wondered what it would be like to be able to tell the future. Somehow I don't think it would be in complete, neat chunks, but little bits and pieces -- incomplete data that you have to work from.
This prompt gave me an excuse to explore that.
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Date: 2019-02-18 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 04:20 am (UTC)