(no subject)
Last night I dreamed of a woman who committed suicide.
There was a voice over, references to a poem or an excerpt from a book. Something about a river. Virginia Woolf, maybe.
She did it in a large, tall, glass tank - like what you'd expect to see in an aquarium, or a mad scientists lab. Like the glass jar my mother used to use to store her cotton balls.
Like what you might use to kill an insect with a cotton ball soaked in acetate - to keep it whole, for pinning. After you watch it die.
Anyway, she did that, drowning herself in a giant glass jar, held down under a weight (like what stylists use at the salon? to sterlize their tools? There's a thing that floats in there, at the top - under that, maybe.)
Only she changed her mind, as she was drowning. But she had put in measures against that, of course. She hadn't left herself a choice. So she died anyway, and you could see it - you, me. The dreamer - the change of expressions across her face. The realization that this was it.
Only she DID have a choice. She fought, in the end. She struggled, and she died with the echo of it on her face, and her arms stretched out in a fighting stance, pushing against the glass. She did this, knowing she would lose, but wanting her family to know, when they found her, that she knew she'd made a mistake. She made her body her suicide note - I'm sorry. This was wrong. I'm sorry. I love you. I tried.
***
I forgot about this dream. I woke up remembering the one about the flood - of course, the flood. Because water = emotion. And this was a tsumami, to be exact; crashing over houses, drowning children; houses that were also bureaus, me searching through drawers for children that were also my daughter's toys. Plastic ponies and motionless little people. And weirdly (and this is the only thing that makes me wonder), a plastic toy mother was calling out for her missing toy son - Johnny Mac! Johnny Mac, where are you? Johnny Mac being the name of a character in one of my stories, a young man who died in Vietnam. Now why would THAT be the thing I take into my waking day??
But I was reminded of it because I sent Tom out with the kids to the family party without me. I had planned to go up until the very last moment, but it was so hot and sticky, and our clothes are all over the floor because the laundry never got put up, because I've been running so hard doing All of the Things getting ready for Xmas, because I've been working so hard and I'm so tired, because I'm so beat down over everything that has happened, because, really, I feel unwanted. I don't know why I can be turned over so easily, by employers, by best friends. I must be ugly - yes that's it. Nothing fits, nothing looks right, I'm fat and ugly and unwanted, and I have nothing to wear.
Of course I don't really believe that is true - unfortunately the laundry thing is very true and I honestly could not find anything to put on. At least, I could not find anything to put on that made me feel comfortable enough and, therefore, strong enough to be with people and pretendl like my heart isn't breaking,
But it is breaking. It hurts. It hurts.
So I started sorting laundry and I sent Tom and the children away, and it occured to me, as he closed the door behind them - if something happens to me tonight... if anything happens to me tonight that isn't irefutably an accident, they will think I did it to myself.
And then I remembered the woman in my dream.
What was she trying to tell me, I wonder? Not to give up? Because I don't plan to. I'm not that girl anymore.
But, still.
but still.