Wednesday, April 7, 2010

only in dreams


I know that dreams are the products of random electrical firing in your brain. I do, I'm aware of this. Your dreams are your brain's way of cleaning itself out, rehashing everything that passed through it that day, occasionally bringing realizations up from your subconscious up to the light, etc.

That doesn't change the fact that dreaming about Jake always throws me for a loop. Dreams featuring him always seem like so much more than just brain-vomit. Sometimes, when I'm feeling ridiculous, I think that maybe he, or what is left of him, his energy or whatever, contacts me through my dreams, hangs out in my head, as if to say, 'remember me? I miss you too, invisible cloud of particles though I may be.'

I had the loveliest dream about him last night, accurate down to the particular inflections of his voice and idiosyncracies of speech. I dreamt I went to visit him, and they'd gotten a dog, and she'd just had puppies. I hung out with him and his mom and puppies- three things I love entirely too much, Jake, his mom, and baby dogs- and then I came home, went to work, where I laid the smack down on Ricardo, and came back to my little apartment to find him waiting for me. I dreamt of the way he kissed me, and the way he held me, and the way he talked to me, and about other things too, things we never did but probably should have. I know it's stupid to be so strongly affected by a dream, but it was so REAL. I could feel the stubble on his face and smell his breath and even see, up close and personal, every little expression that crossed his face. It was weird too because in this dream, his cancer had happened but he'd recovered fully, and all the things that went unspoken between us before were out, and it was all very comfortable and exciting and so, so real. It was a dream of how things should have been, or would have been, maybe? God I miss that kid.

It's funny how quickly life changes, and how little you notice the changes while they happen. Jake and I were supposed to live in San Francisco and be neighbors and best friends and hang out all the time. He'd work at a non-profit and I'd be a teacher, and Friday nights we would get high and watch 'Planet Earth,' and it would be just like it used to be. Now, he's been dead a year and a half, I'm moving to the Bay in June, I'm in love with someone else... Weird, weird, weird all around. I don't know how things would have gone, had he not died, but I'm fairly certain that life right now would not be anything like it is. Not that that's good, or bad... mostly just weird. Hmph.