Another dream

I wrote this this morning, and debated about posting it. After reading it again, I figured why not. I told my sister about my dream, and she suggested maybe this is some form of closure for me. Maybe she's right.

I had a very weird dream last night. And now I'm thinking, why in the heck am I dreaming about my ex-husband again?!? Go away already!

Truthfully, y'all, unlike the last dream I had, this was not my ex husband. This guy just looked like him and my dream said it was. This man had character...and remorse.

In this completely improbable scenario he looked well, although unhappy. He was holding down a job in some kind of small factory, where he had been secretly working for a number of years before we split up. We were talking and it was completely unemotional...just two people who used to know each other. I wasn't afraid. Nor was I angry.

I must have hung around for quite a while, because we moved from his workplace to his apartment. It turns out he'd been living a secret life for many years. He had had this nice apartment for a year and a half before we split and for the years since. So this is what happened to the money that we should have had but didn't, I asked, and he nodded. The run down places we'd lived in ran through my mind in succession. The rotting singlewide with the trash heap behind it. The 100-year-old house with poor heat and no hot water. The rotting doublewide in the middle of nowhere with the siding peeling off, but the gorgeous view of Horse Creek Valley. We could have done better.

He'd had "plans," he told me. Said he'd been planning all that time to leave me, but I left before he could. I asked if it was for another woman. It was. He currently had two girlfriends, both alcoholic, neither good women, and he talked as though he regretted the choices he made. As though he regretted what he gave up. But it didn't matter anymore.

I looked through his bookcases filled with my old Danille Steel novels and found my old yearbooks. I was so happy to see them again! I asked if I could have them back, and he said I could. I started asking for the family heirlooms he kept, like the bedspread my grandmother made for my parents' wedding, and the Georgia flag that had hung over my dad's bunker in Vietnam. He began looking for them, and promised to look in earnest after I left. For once, I believed he would.

It was all just so weird. But at least for the duration of the dream, everything about our life together made sense. There was a logic behind it all. The reality is...there wasn't. The beauty is...it doesn't matter anymore. Where ever he is, whatever he's doing, he has to live with the choices he's made. But the kids and I are happy now...and that is all that matters.