Where I am.
I was at some kind of boarding school, with a bunch of people. The only class I could remember was a sort of Literature class where we studied the works of Sylvia Plath. There were written tests, where instead of blanks to fill in (that look like actual __________ blanks), there were keywords we were supposed to memorize and, on the test, those keywords were followed by these big gaps in the page, and we were supposed to write specific things in the gaps that related to the keywords. It was an impossible kind of test, and yet I was doing pretty well with it. I'm sure I didn't ace it, or make an A, but I know I passed, and probably did better than most of the class.
We lived in these weird dorms that were kind of like this Escher drawing. Parts of each dorm were outside, parts were inside, parts had dirt floor and seemed outside even though they were inside, and they melded together in this chaotic mess. We had horses living with us, and they spoke. I was talking to this girl who sometimes seemed like a girl in my class, and sometimes took the form of one of the horses, about her room. Her name reminded me of part of the exam; it was different based on the context in which I used it, and I was teaching her what it was, because she didn't understand it herself.
Somehow, we started talking about Mom, and it's like we all had the same relationship with her. We were all dealing with her, and now that I have some distance I think it's almost like the different people in the dream were different aspects of me and Mikki, like we'd been splintered into lots of different people at different stages. This girl/horse I spoke to wanted to paint her room, and I was telling her about how she would have a lot more freedom to paint it whatever she wanted when she moved out on her own, but in the meantime I kind of mischievously suggested that she paint her room black. It's the color she wanted; somehow I instinctively knew that.
The rest of the dream was about actually painting her room black, and processing how Mom was going to flip out about it.
Yeah, I haven't said much about it, but Mom has been very present for the last week or so, particularly in my dreams. Sometimes her presence is very surreal and peripheral, like the dream I just recounted above, and other times it's very clear.
It's not only in my dreams, either. I was making an unexpected trip to Westerly on Monday; the other speaker in the Speakers Bureau got his dates mixed up and double-booked himself, so I drove down there to do the speaking gig myself. I got stuck behind a funeral procession on the highway; the speed limit was 65, but they were doing 40. After having a little tantrum, in which I yelled to them something like sorry about your loss, but you're driving TWENTY FIVE MILES AN HOUR UNDER THE SPEED LIMIT AND HOGGING BOTH LANES! I realized that on that morning, two years prior, Mom was already dead but we hadn't discovered her yet.
Suddenly, the frustration I felt at the cars in front of me (something that doesn't usually get to me that much, at least to the degree that it did then) came out as much more specific anger at Mom. I've never gotten any confirmation, and somehow I doubt I ever will, but my gut feeling is still that her death was deliberate, in a kind of passive-aggressive way, and on Monday I was really angry about it. The thing about suicide that people don't think about (or maybe they do, and just don't care, which is possibly worse) is that somebody is going to have to eventually find their body, and it's probably not going to happen in a timely manner, and the body decomposes at a much faster rate than we expect it to. I was really pissed off at her about that, that she probably didn't consider that. It was probably traumatic for the cop, and the apartment manager, to stumble across her almost week-old corpse on the bedroom floor, and it was definitely unpleasant for Mikki to tell me that underneath the towel on the floor in the bedroom was the stain of her body fluid that they could not clean up; she put the towel over it because it was just too disturbing to her to be reminded over and over as we emptied and cleaned.
And as I drove (it was quite some distance, almost an hour away, so I had lots of time) that moved into grief. This huge unprocessed bubble of it came up to the surface, and I found myself bawling as I drove. It was as if I had been transported back two years, back to that time where I did not know she was gone, then that moment where I felt her absence strongly, and the mix of guilt, and lost opportunity, and sadness contemplating her final moments, just overwhelmed me. It's interesting to me that I went to this same high school to speak the day before I got on that plane to Houston, in which I took the picture in the userpic, and here I was again. I thought I might have a hard time holding it together while I spoke, but I did fine. There were a couple of moments where I had to pause and take a deep breath, to avoid falling apart, but I don't think anyone noticed.
Part of me is kind of rolling my eyes at the fact that I'm still processing it, impatient for the whole thing to be over. And part of me acknowledges that it's never over, that there are always more layers to processing the grief, that in a way it just gets more familiar.
In any case, today is the two year anniversary of the discovery of her body.
In other news, I have the flu. Because I believe that everything is connected, I'm not surprised that I'm sick right now.
Part of my anger about getting this speaking gig at the last minute is that I had been planning to see a nurse at my clinic, to get my swollen neck checked out and maybe get a flu shot. My landlady, who is a phlebotomist, noticed on Sunday night that my neck was a little swollen, like my lymph nodes are maybe off. I felt really run down all weekend, so I was concerned about this added piece. Of course, on the drive to Providence after the speaking gig, I started to feel the body aches. There had been some aches in my upper back, but those were stress-related; this was spreading out all over my back, and feeling very flu-like.
When I got to the clinic, they told me that they could give me the shot if I didn't have a fever. Thankfully, my normal body temperature seems to be lower than average, because it was 97° F (36.1° C) even though it felt like I had the initial hint of a fever, at least to me. So I got the shot. I wanted to talk to someone about the swollen lymph nodes, but the actual nurse was really busy, so I let it go. So far, it seems that the shot might have been a good idea, because while I am still sick, it's not as severe as some people have reported their flu was. I still feel awful for the most part, but I've definitely felt worse before. It's helped that I've been able to mostly stay home and pamper myself; yesterday was a holiday, and tonight's class is probably skippable too. I know enough people in the class to where I can get notes later.
So now, I'm going to take a leisurely dip into school work, so that I don't get totally stressed out by how behind I am when this passes over.
We lived in these weird dorms that were kind of like this Escher drawing. Parts of each dorm were outside, parts were inside, parts had dirt floor and seemed outside even though they were inside, and they melded together in this chaotic mess. We had horses living with us, and they spoke. I was talking to this girl who sometimes seemed like a girl in my class, and sometimes took the form of one of the horses, about her room. Her name reminded me of part of the exam; it was different based on the context in which I used it, and I was teaching her what it was, because she didn't understand it herself.
Somehow, we started talking about Mom, and it's like we all had the same relationship with her. We were all dealing with her, and now that I have some distance I think it's almost like the different people in the dream were different aspects of me and Mikki, like we'd been splintered into lots of different people at different stages. This girl/horse I spoke to wanted to paint her room, and I was telling her about how she would have a lot more freedom to paint it whatever she wanted when she moved out on her own, but in the meantime I kind of mischievously suggested that she paint her room black. It's the color she wanted; somehow I instinctively knew that.
The rest of the dream was about actually painting her room black, and processing how Mom was going to flip out about it.
Yeah, I haven't said much about it, but Mom has been very present for the last week or so, particularly in my dreams. Sometimes her presence is very surreal and peripheral, like the dream I just recounted above, and other times it's very clear.
It's not only in my dreams, either. I was making an unexpected trip to Westerly on Monday; the other speaker in the Speakers Bureau got his dates mixed up and double-booked himself, so I drove down there to do the speaking gig myself. I got stuck behind a funeral procession on the highway; the speed limit was 65, but they were doing 40. After having a little tantrum, in which I yelled to them something like sorry about your loss, but you're driving TWENTY FIVE MILES AN HOUR UNDER THE SPEED LIMIT AND HOGGING BOTH LANES! I realized that on that morning, two years prior, Mom was already dead but we hadn't discovered her yet.
Suddenly, the frustration I felt at the cars in front of me (something that doesn't usually get to me that much, at least to the degree that it did then) came out as much more specific anger at Mom. I've never gotten any confirmation, and somehow I doubt I ever will, but my gut feeling is still that her death was deliberate, in a kind of passive-aggressive way, and on Monday I was really angry about it. The thing about suicide that people don't think about (or maybe they do, and just don't care, which is possibly worse) is that somebody is going to have to eventually find their body, and it's probably not going to happen in a timely manner, and the body decomposes at a much faster rate than we expect it to. I was really pissed off at her about that, that she probably didn't consider that. It was probably traumatic for the cop, and the apartment manager, to stumble across her almost week-old corpse on the bedroom floor, and it was definitely unpleasant for Mikki to tell me that underneath the towel on the floor in the bedroom was the stain of her body fluid that they could not clean up; she put the towel over it because it was just too disturbing to her to be reminded over and over as we emptied and cleaned.
And as I drove (it was quite some distance, almost an hour away, so I had lots of time) that moved into grief. This huge unprocessed bubble of it came up to the surface, and I found myself bawling as I drove. It was as if I had been transported back two years, back to that time where I did not know she was gone, then that moment where I felt her absence strongly, and the mix of guilt, and lost opportunity, and sadness contemplating her final moments, just overwhelmed me. It's interesting to me that I went to this same high school to speak the day before I got on that plane to Houston, in which I took the picture in the userpic, and here I was again. I thought I might have a hard time holding it together while I spoke, but I did fine. There were a couple of moments where I had to pause and take a deep breath, to avoid falling apart, but I don't think anyone noticed.
Part of me is kind of rolling my eyes at the fact that I'm still processing it, impatient for the whole thing to be over. And part of me acknowledges that it's never over, that there are always more layers to processing the grief, that in a way it just gets more familiar.
In any case, today is the two year anniversary of the discovery of her body.
In other news, I have the flu. Because I believe that everything is connected, I'm not surprised that I'm sick right now.
Part of my anger about getting this speaking gig at the last minute is that I had been planning to see a nurse at my clinic, to get my swollen neck checked out and maybe get a flu shot. My landlady, who is a phlebotomist, noticed on Sunday night that my neck was a little swollen, like my lymph nodes are maybe off. I felt really run down all weekend, so I was concerned about this added piece. Of course, on the drive to Providence after the speaking gig, I started to feel the body aches. There had been some aches in my upper back, but those were stress-related; this was spreading out all over my back, and feeling very flu-like.
When I got to the clinic, they told me that they could give me the shot if I didn't have a fever. Thankfully, my normal body temperature seems to be lower than average, because it was 97° F (36.1° C) even though it felt like I had the initial hint of a fever, at least to me. So I got the shot. I wanted to talk to someone about the swollen lymph nodes, but the actual nurse was really busy, so I let it go. So far, it seems that the shot might have been a good idea, because while I am still sick, it's not as severe as some people have reported their flu was. I still feel awful for the most part, but I've definitely felt worse before. It's helped that I've been able to mostly stay home and pamper myself; yesterday was a holiday, and tonight's class is probably skippable too. I know enough people in the class to where I can get notes later.
So now, I'm going to take a leisurely dip into school work, so that I don't get totally stressed out by how behind I am when this passes over.