I wonder if my imagining coincidences everywhere counts as delusions of grandeur.
I had several dreams last night, they were actually cool. I didn’t take melatonin last night, but slept for 12 hours.
I’m trying not to be mad that the boy is texting me, it’s 5pm, he should.
Here we go, in pieces as always, I dreamed of my grandmother and I don’t want this to go anywhere.
Suddenly, I can’t remember if I ever saw her, except from behind, walking away. I remember walking into the garage of our (yes I said our, not hers and I’m keeping it) and there was a room in the back, the way there had been (omg I’m realizing I don’t know and it’s killing me) in her garage.
In that little room back there was not her, but my mother in law, and that’s a different story.
In that garage had been, earlier in the dream, that did not include my grandmother, my ex, and one of my friends, and the usual bunch of drunken leeches they have hanging around whenever they get together. The guys aren’t all that bad, but the scene that always follows my ex and his friends is bad.
It’s all crumbling and I don’t want it to.
I left the back room and went to a little house next door, it looked like a house I had looked at with my ex, but it was white with a dove gray shingle roof, a dirt driveway covered in pine needles, the way things would have been in NH during early November, not NY. But inside was my grandmother.
Thinking, I believe that the pine needles were long, like North Carolina.
I remember that she had something for me, as I rolled over to the house, in a white bmw 320i, which I do not want. I stepped over pine roots on the walkway, and remember seeing that inside there was a rosy hue, perhaps coming from the light shades, a rose colored wallpaper – it was nice.
I could imagine the box that she left for me. It was white, like the book of pictures from my christening, with the same delicate gold embossed oval around the outside, and her deliberate handwriting, so neat, it was visible the amount of times she had been told it was not good enough, every year of ridicule and every ounce of effort knowing it would never be as good as a white woman’s for reasons that no matter how hard she looked, she could not see what was wrong with it, but they always found something. That slight shake at the corner of each letter, to make sure that the lines absolutely connected perfectly, on the dot, every time, every single fucking time, and if she had to double back to make sure, it was a perfect retrace, a line almost imperceptibly thicker than the others.
She married a calligrapher. What in the everliving white, omg. My current boyfriend’s ex is a calligrapher.
In the box, was supposed to be my biological grandfather’s head. She wanted me to have it.
But when I went into the house, while I remember what she looked like, and even smiling, she was not there. I turned around to go back across the field – the houses were the way they should have been, before my mother fucked everything up – that little house across the field from my grandmother’s big house.
Knowing my parents, and knowing my grandmother, she probably gave my parents the big house and went to go live in the little house so that my father would shut up. And because her house was better for kids.
I went back over to the house, walked into the garage, and my Mother was there, I was unsurprised. I asked her if she had seen the box, she of course said no. She had no idea what I was talking about. She never does.
She told me to ask my grandmother, who was outside. I turned to look out the garage doors, and in the field, which clearly was the front view of that amazing property that my grandmother had sacrificed her whole life to give to children who did not care about it, as a 1984 white rabbit parked next to my bmw.
I remember inching closer to see if there was someone inside. It looked like there was, but I couldn’t see who.
I just realized why my uncle had been so mean to my mom. My grandmother had given her the property next door, and my father had made them sell it. I’d be livid, myself.
I was crying, but there was legit something in my eye this time. My ex used to always remark about how often things fell in my eyes, and I remember in my dream at some point there was a toddler wearing goggles under his glasses, and squirting vinegar in my eyes. Wtf, I can’t remember whose kid it was, but he was Black, and it felt like it was my ex’s house (I said that, but I see that I mean my ex’s parents house) but the layout felt like my most recently deceased Uncle’s house.
Let’s see if I have time to talk about the preceding part of my dream.
It’s my own stupid fault for sleeping until 5 on a Friday, there were things I should have done today, but did not. The boy just reminded me of some of them.
I went into the same garage, it was actually the shape of a garage I was partying at in NH recently, but also felt like my parent’s garage in NH, and maybe NH is just starting to all feel the same at this point.
My ex and his friends, in particular my one NH friend that shares his astrological sign, were drinking beers, or more accurately, holding beers that warmed in their hands so that they had an excuse to be assholes, in front, just shooting the shit as it were.
I walked into the back room, where my mother in law was seated in her living room (you know how dreams do that). It was set up in the way it was when I first met her, come to think of it, before her insane husband became outrageously proud of the deal he was getting on gigantic La-z-boy chairs.
It was just us, always a good thing. She had tea set up on her dark cherrywood tilt-top table. She does not drink tea, but does love that table. Actually, the shape of the pot would have been for coffee, not tea, but whatever.
I remember that, in the way that dreams work like this, I had been going there, walking past the basement with drunken people, and having coffee with her, every day.
I remember that I was having increasingly more difficulty lifting the pot, due to my shoulders. Maybe that was why she kept asking me to do it, so that I would notice.
I woke up in so much pain today, I seriously must see a doctor.
I can’t remember if I took melatonin last night, but I should.
One sip into my second cup of coffee and I’m already texting the boy about dinner plans tonight… this is how I end up hating people. I do it to myself.
It’s not his fault.
There was a room in the back of the garage in my childhood home – when I moved in, before my brother was born, it had been the coal chamber.
How did I not remember this?
The boy and I had a fight tonight. Not really a fight. At all. And I’m only writing because I’m eating a sandwich.
I don’t want to be cruel, but I am.
How on earth does a man somehow think his troubles rank, anywhere, in the scope of mine? A man like that?
This dream is starting to make sense.