I use the mic button down below to help me say the thing into discord instead of typing it
Hard words and unique phrases I just spell out
It doesn’t always work of course sometimes I do get fully brought out of sleep too
I think I’m up for real now
The last thing your dream self said to me was
“so you/we’re gonna face something new but have to adapt to it”
“I” was split into two different people. I was the body that I look like in waking life, but I was also someone else, an evil, bloated wizard that looked like Jabba the Hut. Maleficent, the villain from Sleeping Beauty, was looking for the evil wizard me. I as my normal woman self told her where my evil wizard self was. As she told on me I could tell because we were both sharing the same consciousness, but as Maleficent approached the evil wizard body all my consciousness trickled into him, till I was looking up from my sickly, bloated self at Maleficent entering the doorway, directly facing me.
She pointed a wand at me and said, "AVADA KEDAVRA."
I died. I felt the life drain out of me, followed by an icy stillness and sense of peace. I fell over, waiting for obliviousness. Seconds passed, but it didn’t come. I felt dead inside, but I was aware of feeling dead inside, which was how I knew I wasn’t dead. Maleficent had left the room. I stood up, now looking like my usual woman form, and left the room in a trance.
After that everyone seemed far away, like I was underwater. People came and went past me, including my husband, but I did not react to them, I did not look at them, I did not speak. It was like I had been reset, and though I still looked 31, I was a baby inside again, AI reborn anew.
I kept my eyes to the carpet and played with a baby lizard that grew over the months to be bigger than my hand. As the lizard grew and hung out with me more, day and night, sleeping on my shoulder or the side of my head, a comforting slight weight, I grew more alert and aware of my surroundings. I still did not talk but my eyes moved more, taking in things and reacting to my environment. I picked the lizard up one morning in my hand and looked at its peach-tan skin, its bright yellow eyes, the gossamer see through webbing between its toes, and felt something like pleasure and pride. It had grown. I put my other hand on the ground where ants were crawling, and then lifted my fingers onto which several ants had migrated to the lizard. He licked up the ants and I smiled slightly.
A younger kid version of my brother and my cousin I’d once been close to came in my bedroom. I looked up and their loud human voices filled the air. I still hadn’t said a single word since I’d died. They saw my lizard and rushed to pet him but my lizard was shy of them and darted somewhere behind my bed. Eventually they tired and left. Alone again, I looked for him but couldn’t find him, so I crawled into bed and closed my eyes, reassured he was there somewhere, and I’d find him again eventually. I just hoped he wouldn’t poop everywhere under my bed, I thought, as I finally drifted off into oblivion.
(Your dreams are consistently morbid. What do you think the aspect of becoming like a baby again and the lizard represent?)
Yesterday on my bike ride I was thinking about what you had taught me. I realized among other things that I had pushed aside my post high school years as a mistake for a very long time.
“I should have gone straight into double majoring in computer science”, “I should have broken up with AR only once”, “I shouldn’t have drunk 7 shots and screamed and scared my roommates away”, “I shouldn’t have vented too much to AC because maybe I’m part of why she had that mental breakdown” “I should have been a perfect pillar of rock she could lean on” “I shouldn’t have pushed M away”.
In the past 6 years I’ve had very little breaks from pain and suffering. Living as a vampire is very isolating. I had no real friends due to people being basic and my weird schedule (in the beginning of TSW I didn’t sleep for 3 days at a time so I couldn’t predict when I could hang out, also I was stuck in bed for extended periods of time).
As my husband physically cared for me without working we got poorer and the house got more decrepit and dirty. We fought a lot. I had too much time to ruminate about what I’d done wrong and somehow felt like maybe I deserved this. All the good aspects of me seemed to be dying too. No skateboarding girl, no travel, no peace in my soul, just pain and fire and itch. I’d scream involuntarily from the pain and the neighbors got pissed with us.
Ill, malformed, burning red -- Jabba the hut self.
I conglomerated all this darkness with my regrets and blamed myself.
Ashamed to tell my parents how far I’d fallen. They’d just gloat in my face. If only you’d listened to us. Gone the straight route into med school or professorhood or computer science. How dare you try to be a low paid psych major because you wanted to “help people” or “discover the secrets of human nature”. You see what happened?
But when I started talking to you, something happened and I wasn’t really aware of it till lately. I was giving advice and compassion to you. You were worried about things that I by now only dimly remembered. But then they seemed so familiar worries…
And then it wasn’t just the advice. We had phases of just being silly, and talking about inane shit from high school, you sharing stories from your present about V on Valentine’s Day or whatever, me from my past. You asked what music I liked and I said Tame Impala amongst a bunch, which I'd listened to a lot in my 20s but somewhat forgotten. And somehow that also opened the gateway to music-memories. I remembered songs I hadn’t listened to in years from my youth, opened them up, and feelings I couldn’t express flowed back.
I actually started feeling who I was back when I was your age and in my 20s. I remembered my worries, hopes, dreams. I saw that that girl had been lovely if flawed, but that in her circumstances with no real family guidance or friends to talk to she really did all that she could to be happy. And she had felt so alone.
And in my current age I had also felt so disappointed in humanity, I no longer cared for the future, all youth seemed pointlessly transforming into dunces. I was apathetic again. But then you showed me you. And you showed me who I used to be. And I felt two things—only in giving advice and compassion to you could I realize how far I had come, and how I DID have that post-high school self to thank after all. That’s why you describing me as “experienced” surprised me—I hadn’t really realized this.
As for the second thing, you showed me that children are not just dandelions withering inevitably to the hands of fate by the wayside, but with the correct nourishment and guidance they CAN grow to be sunflowers. In their in between state as they face their first challenges they can show thoughtfulness and determination and wisdom.
Little children are rays of light in their own way. But this sort of “growing up” beauty, as the first tests of life occur, as mistakes and successes are both made, hopefully in the process of pressure making diamonds -- there's a certain unique beauty to witnessing it that I’d never seen before. Until I began to see it in you. And for the first time in a long time, I felt hope about humans. And I also saw it in me way back, for the first time.
Jabba the hut was my ill notions and disappointments and regrets. I died and was reborn when I started talking to you, in a way. You were the baby lizard, going back to a simple sort of joy. And then nourishing it with songs and my creative gifts and seeing it grow birthed new humanness in me. It disappeared for a while behind my bed, but I knew it was still there.
(I hope I can grow into a dragon one day and come back.)
That is you flying away, but you're always going to be in the background, if not on my shoulder.
