Feeling: quiet
Listening to: Melissa Ferrick - Drive
Reading/Watching: Hush

I get the dream in many variations- recurring, but not often.

I can't remember when the first time was. When, between the world of eyelids and the soft of dark, I dreamed myself weeping over his body. Must have been a long time ago, because I remember having them in junior high.

It's significant, because he is my subconscious idea of something perfect that should never be harmed. I'm sure he'd disagree; he's always been self-deprecating like that, like me. He is all the things that people want to be, and because he doesn't know it, it makes him all the more valuable.

But regardless of when it began, or when it will ever end, it happens. Every time I am afraid that something terrible is about to happen, I dream that my little brother has died.

Sometimes I see it happen. Sometimes I try to save him, and fail. Sometimes I begin dreaming and he is already gone, and I am holding him and crying myself inside out. From the beginning of college, I started dreaming of that god-awful phone call from a family member, and how I would flop awkwardly in a tangle of knees and elbows, always in front of so many people, and begin screaming.

Sometimes it does precede something happening. Sometimes it is merely an expression of my dread. More often it is while I have a huge choice hanging over me, and I fear the consequences.

The last time I dreamed it, I was standing in the street, looking at his hearse, and suddenly it began moving, rolling away from me. I began to try to run after it, but in the nature of all dreams, my feet could not move. I had no idea where it was going, and I began screaming, my throat breaking, tears rolling down my face, begging it to come back, come back. Please, please, come back. Don't leave me.

I woke from it with tears on my cheeks, and realized the bed was not mine. It was the first time I'd ever woken to having someone there with me. Someone with his arms around me, voice against my hair, asking what was wrong.

At the time, I thought the dream meant I'd made a horrible mistake. I thought it was a sign, and I acted accordingly, saying, "I think we both know this isn't going to work. So let's just pretend it never happened."

'Course, I've never been good at that, erasing something. Within 24 hours I had completely changed my mind, after spending a day completely incapable of forgetting any one second of the previous night. And I know it's pointless to remember, because true to our words, after enough emotional acrobatics, we are pretending it never happened, so it doesn't matter what I remember or what I miss.

I just wanted to set one thing straight. I dreamed that I lost my brother, and in a way, it was a warning of bad things to come. Because I lost a sister. A heart-sister, if not a blood-sister. The dream just didn't say anything about whether it was as great a loss as I feared.

Remembering that dream made me remember also what a true sister/brother is like. A sister who said I could run away to her apartment anytime, when the sight of my own town was making me crazy. A brother who intuitively knew when I needed a hug, and despite being a seventeen-year-old football player, still stayed up talking about life with me until the wee hours.

Aforementioned heart-sister wrote me a letter saying she'd changed her mind. The entire tone of the letter reminded me of a husband on the front porch, facing his battered wife: "I didn't mean it, baby, you just make me so mad sometimes, and you know how I am when I've been drinking, I just love you too much, but it's over now, I'm not mad anymore, and I promise, I'll be different from now on." He asks, thinking he already knows the answer. So confident that all it takes is an apology.

I wrote my answer, asking for an indefinite amount of time to be apart. I'm still learning not to be a sidekick, still learning I can be sufficient on my own, and I will never be the woman who opens the door again every time someone's lips form empty apologetic syllables.

Today I watched an episode of Buffy in which Willow woke from a nightmare with Oz's arms around her, and suddenly remembered the once in my life when I knew what that was like, to go from fear to comfort and safety so quickly.

No point here; just saying. It was nice. And sometimes I run too hard from things that are nice because it seems there's no possible way they can be real.

(Mainly 'cause they rarely are.)

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