Dream State

I had a dream.

I hardly ever have dreams that I can remember.

It's been happening more and more lately:

bits and pieces floating in the front of my brain as I wake up.

Mostly, they have been nothing, ordinary, innocuous.  

I'll remember a tiny snippet and it fades away as the day goes on.  

But this time, it stuck...not the whole thing, just the short and terrible scene that made me wake up.

And the feeling it gave me,

 one I used to know so well, but haven't been met with for a long while now.

I haven't done any art to speak of...not until today...not that what I made is art, I suppose.

I used to art journal every single day.

It wasn't a day until I had done something.

Art journaling, for me, was therapy, 

a way to get my feelings out of my head so they would let me breath.

And then, slowly, I stopped needing it.

I got to a point where I felt...almost fixed...and then I didn't want to pick up the pencil or the brush.

I wanted to start living again and it felt like the art was holding me back in some way.

I would still do art stuff from time to time, but only to try to make a pretty picture...

I didn't need to do it to get rid of the tornadoes inside of me.

The whirlwinds were barely there and when they did flare up, 

I could quiet them down without the pages and the paints.

Today, there was not a tornado in me.

There was a vicious lightening strike to my heart,

and, I swear, the static it caused...it's taking everything I have to keep going.

I couldn't make her sad enough or ugly enough or pretty enough and so she had to go.

I started doing art stuff to deal with the loss of someone very dear to me.

He was someone I loved so very much, and he killed himself.

I made my pictures for years and years, 

just trying to stay sane,

trying to make the grief and love and denial and anger become something I could bear.

And it helped.

It helped me so much.

I truly believe I wouldn't be sitting here today if it wasn't for art.

That dream just got to me.

The part of the dream that I remember is that I had just found out he was dead, 

and I was frantically in denial,

 trying to figure out what really happened, 

begging and pleading for it not to be true,

 the feeling that someone I loved, maybe the only person I ever had loved to that point, 

was gone forever...a terrible, all-encompassing grief.

The same way I felt eight years ago when it actually happened.

And when I woke up, the sadness was there, as fresh as it could possibly be, just clinging to me.

He's not there in my dreams, only the loss of him is.

Why do I never dream him?

Only once, right after it happened, an almost sacred thing.

If I were a believer, I would call it a vision.

But I'm not a believer, so it can only be a dream, realistic and comforting.

But only a dream, and only that one.

Eight years is a long time to hold on to a dream when night after night you get pelted with blank nothingness...or sometimes nightmares.

Are they nightmares when they're not scary?

It wasn't scary, only heartbreaking...shattering something that's been in pieces before.

For a long time, only pieces.

The girl just wouldn't come out, so I collaged over her after the fourth or fifth attempt at getting her right.
Collage is not my strongest point, but neither was paint today, so it had to be done.
This seems so busy and disjointed, but so is my mind.
It's fitting, I suppose.

And so, when the sadness stuck to me like it used to, I turned to the thing that used to stop it, my art journal.  Paper and paint that I sat down a good while ago.

Man, did it show.

I painted the girl about four or five times, but she was never sad enough, or ugly enough, or pretty enough.  My paper was one layer of paint away from total collapse...a state I myself have been in plenty of times...so I gave up and threw down this collage.  It's incoherent and scattered, I think.  So am I today.  It didn't solve anything, but it helped a little.  Enough for now.

I miss him.

In a bone-shattering way.

It's been eight years.

I'm thirty-six years old.

He never saw thirty.

I don't get to know if he would have fattened up in his old age like I have.

If he would have kept his thick head of hair, or lost it over time.

If the wisdom and kindness he possessed would have deepened even more.

He doesn't get to know how much I loved him.

How much I still do.

How much I hurt now.

He doesn't get to change his mind.

Neither do I.

He doesn't get anything anymore.

I get to keep going.

I get to remember him.

I get to remember his life and his words and his heart.

And that he's gone.

And that I won't ever let his death be what defines him.

But today, I miss him in a loud way.

My heart is screaming for his.

I was listening to something a few months ago, an interview about interior design.

As they were talking, the interviewer asked the home owner:

"Is this your sanctuary where these things can exist?"

That phrase struck me.

My art journals are like that.

A safe place for feelings that I can't always manage on my own.

I feel like that sanctuary myself sometimes, especially today.

I don't know what happens when people die.

I don't believe anyone does.

I wish I did.

If I had to explain it to a child I think I would say

that people live on in our hearts.

And the people we keep in our hearts had people in their hearts, 

all the way back to the very beginning of people.

And all those people from the beginning of time until now live in our hearts.

We're full of hearts.

Maybe that's why it hurts so bad when someone we love dies, 

because our heart has to expand and make room for them and for all the people they loved.

That's a nice way to think about it, I think.

I don't really believe that though.

No matter how hard I try.

No matter how hard I wish I could.

I try to remember the pieces of my days, 

just in case I ever see him again.

I don't think I will and that's what hurts the most.  That all his goodness is gone.

Or maybe not gone, but not found all at once, not found in one person.

He was the only person that held all his goodness.

But sometimes, when I miss him the most, 

I try to pick details of the day around me, sometimes big events, 

but mostly just small nothings that I can still see

and he cannot.

I try to take in every bit of it, so that one day, 

if I'm wrong...and I hope more than anything that I am...

I'll get to tell him all the things he's missed in these long years since he's been gone.

So here I am, sitting here typing while I should be in bed.

So here I am, a victim of sad dreams, 

a painter of love and of loss, 

keeper of the hearts of millions and millions of people, 

curator of a lifetime of tiny memories.

And I miss him.