My nightmare came to me again last night—it crawled inside my mind, like a tick burrowing into flesh. I lay paralyzed with fear. Yet, without the nightmare, I would wake in the morning and feel dead to the world. My husband was gone and I had to accept it.
In the beginning, my therapist analyzed my dreams into a pretty package wrapped by the bow of grief. But I know these nightmares come to punish me. To make me suffer for his loss, my loneliness. They lash out, they whisper, they taunt and I suffer.
My nightmare is a man. He comes to me at night and steals my body and rapes my soul. Or is it the other way around? I’m unsure these days. I’ve grown so tired, I don’t know which and I don’t care to figure it out. I have written dozens of journal entries to explain these ethereal visions to myself. The floating embrace. The hallowed kiss before dawn.
The marks he leaves on my body are real.
A psychotherapist, I’m sure, would argue that I am inflicting the wounds upon myself in deep sleep state. A hidden camera would prove it.
It would be wrong.
He comes to me at night. In my dreams. This thing. This creature that has attached itself to me in the cemetery of death’s goodbye.
His kisses are soft and gentle—a pleasure. I wake to the sounds of my own moans and the feel of a strong hand caressing my hip. “Beautiful,” he would say.
But now he is gone.
I’ve cried so hard my eyes are swollen. Is it possible to crave someone so much that you can conjure him into your dreams? Is it wrong to wish for his return?
I used to trace the freckles beneath my husband’s eye with my finger and then kiss them goodnight.
I listened for rain falling outside the window. A cold wind blowing across the frozen land, chilling those that roam and numbing the soul. Peace in the quiet of night.
The paperwork was done and I whispered a final goodbye to the name of the man stamped across the top.
My therapist says I’m not crazy, but if he were inside my mind that’s not what he would think. My therapist says it’s natural for me to be in mourning—my loss was great. But, I should be better now. Some people can get up from these events, horrible, tragic events, wipe their hands and go on. Their loss firmly tucked in the shadows of their minds. But not me. The pain is in every pore. The depression a blanket of misgivings. It weighs heavy on me, easing me into a lethargic bundle of sadness that I curl into and stay, waiting for him to come back and forgive me.
I had the dream again last night. He is alive in my life. We have not divided our assets and paid the attorneys. We are smiling, free of the pain. The union that once began out of love—not the dark death of divorce.
