Can't shake it

I wake up every morning having somehow forgotten. Sleep sends me to a place where everything is okay, where I still have P in my life - then I wake up and have to accept all over again what's really happened to me. It doesn't help that for the last four nights I've dreamed of P just before waking up. Last night it was a dream where he was telling me how Ugh had talked him out of being with me. He had realized it was all wrong and was telling me how sorry he was that he listened to her. He was kissing me just as I woke up. We were at Taco Stand somehow...The night before that I had some confusing dream about Molly Read's house, Leslie's Kitchen Cam, and Paul and me still being a team. Night before that it was a dream where he was with his new 'girlfriend' but she was young and pretty. We were at some old house and he had been kissing her and when she left, I snuck into her place and he started kissing me. I realized that he knew it was me, and he kept kissing anyway. When she came back, we all had a civil conversation...nothing like the reality of this mess. The night before that I dreamed one of those horrible dreams where P called me and said "I didn't mean any of it. I love you. Let's just be together and forget all the bullshit." Those are the worst.

It's all a big fucking mess. I can't seem to shake it, even with the little snippets of progress I sometimes feel that I'm making, I can't get rid of this awful feeling that nothing will ever be okay again. For all the very real bad stuff he did to me...very real, very bad, cruel and horrible and humiliating...I miss him. I miss him a lot. I think of stupid things, like how I'd do something clumsy and he'd look up and say "French?" in a joking "what the hell?" kind of way. I have fleeting unexpected glimpses of stuff, like me sitting in his lap and him looking at me with his eyes full of love, and my heart breaks all over again. He treated me like a dog; why do I still miss him?

And now it's Thanksgiving. How can I help but think of the first Thanksgiving with him, before we'd even seen each other but were still emailing back and forth? It was so fun, and this is so not fun. Bah humbug.

Dreams and Reality

I had a very odd dream last night. Sometimes upon awakening, I have this weird feeling that tells me a dream is one of those that is going to come true. Now these dreams don't come to pass in a literal way, but they somehow end up pointing to something tangible that happens in the waking world. This felt like one of those. What's odd is that the dreams are usually about really insignificant things. For example, I once dreamed about an old house on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta that I used to drive by every day on my way to work. In my dream, as I passed where the house should be, I saw that it wasn't there any more. It appeared to have just been torn down and all that was left was a bunch of bricks and dust. A few days later I drove by the actual house, which really did exist - old and in ruins and on Ponce de Leon Avenue. Parked in front of the overgrown lot was a bulldozer, and within days the house was gone.

So my dream last night went like this: I had been invited to a Soul Patrol convention, only it was more like a Gray Charles convention. I had decided not to go. As I was driving down Highway 411 to Rome, apparently going to my parents' house, I passed a new, very badly-designed Holiday Inn. It was on the right side of the highway in a spot where I remembered an old farm used to be. It was a hideous circular building, made mostly of glass, a cheap attempt at being modern. There was a big sign out front that read: "Welcome Gray Charles!" or something, then at the bottom, a private message from GC: "Julie or Jena, there is one room left. You get a free upgrade to a suite if you take it." I kept driving. When I arrived at a mythical small-town Rome (nothing like the real one,) I said to myself: "Wait a minute! You're not going to pass up a free suite upgrade!!!" and I turned around and headed back to the ugly glass hotel.

Upon arriving at the Holiday Inn, I went in to register and was greeted by a mean fat lady (sorry, in dreams it's not always pc) at the check-in desk. I remember being very annoyed by the weird placement of the desk, as it was up against the plate glass window and there was nowhere for her to stand and nowhere for me to sit my stuff down. She booked me into a room and I signed for it, not noticing until after I signed the $600 she ended up charging me for two nights in the suite. When I protested, she was very mean and said "That's the price you agreed to."

I went out of the lobby and looked into a big convention room where the Gray Charles thing was going on. It looked horribly dull, like a very bad high-school reunion. I kept walking and came to another room that seemed to be a snack area or reading room. There were some Trekkie-looking people there, and a very short midget-like man (ibid) in glasses. I kept walking, then realized that short man was none other than Gray Charles himself. I came back and peeked in the door and sure enough, it was him. Not wanting to give away his secret identity to the other people in the lobby, I just nodded, and he nodded back. Then I went to find my room, regretting coming and spending the $600 since the group looked very sad and not fun at all.




As I wandered through the labyrinth of hallways looking for my suite I stopped and went into a public restroom. When I tried to leave, the door wouldn't unlock. I forced back the panic (there were no windows and the claustrophobia was tangible) and tried to be calm and reasonable. I banged on the door but no one was around to hear me. I finally realized I had my cell phone with me, and that there was someone at the hotel who I knew I could call on for help. So I called Gray, who minutes later appeared and somehow unlocked the door. It was quite a knight in shining armor moment. He and I stood and talked in the hallway, and since we were away from the awful Taylor fans we were free to let loose and be ourselves. After that I don't remember much of the dream, and though I know there was some excitement and secretive yumminess to the conversation, the rest is a blur.

Besides the obvious 'being saved,' what does it all mean???? And which part might come true?