Last night I dreamed about the house again. The one I've been to hundreds of times in my sleep and is as comfortable as an old winter coat, but that couldn't possibly exist because the rooms don't stay the same. I think it's a part of my mind, or a representation of it. There are a lot of bedrooms and secret passages and mirrored architecture.
If the stairs go up one way, they go up the other way. If there's a room on one side there's a room on the other. They aren't always decorated the same.
I haven't had a dream of that place in a long time.
Trigger Warnings: Dream logic, foggy gun violence, human grief. May contain peanuts. I don't actually recall.
It's kind of an amalgamation of everywhere I've ever lived or been. Parts are elegant, parts look like they came straight out of the 1970's (which I find strange because I wasn't alive in the 70's) and some parts are just rooms straight out of my grandmother's house. The porch is my mother's.
I'll spare you the details of the part of the dream where a skinny Caucasian man with stringy brown hair put a gun in my face and I spent the next segments of the dream wandering the house for a good place to burn incense so I cold call the police about it. I remember stabbing him in the arm when he wasn't looking and kicking the gun across the porch. I remember it being loaded. I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. I didn't know him.
But when I went inside it was The House that greeted me. The same house that's been greeting me every time I've needed it in my dreams my entire life. And I know there is not a soul that can find me in there if I do not want them to.
Hello, my curious congregation. I'm sorry for the radio silence. To those of you still with me, I thank you for your patience. Here is what is going on.
Last month, my grandfather passed away.
Mind you this is not one of those situations where it was someone I barely speak to and saw rarely on holidays. He was the only father I had until I was 5 and he didn't let up afterward. My grandmother had her two girls before she married him and they were teenagers by the time he came into their lives, so when I was born, and my biological disaster walked out, he stepped up, and I was the first child he ever had to actually raise.
I needed some time to sit with my grief on that.
It was sudden. He didn't suffer. We all keep talking about how much of a blessing that was.
There is never anyone in the House. I don't know why I thought I'd find him there now. I didn't. Maybe that's why I never got around to calling the cops, not that I think my phone would work in there anyway. The House is isolated, you see. No guests. But I can stay as long as I want and when I come out it will be like no time has passed at all.
Sleep is like that sometimes.
I still don't know what to say. When I isolated myself this time, I wasn't in the House. I just dropped everything and put my walls up. Buried myself. I want you to understand that I needed to, because holding up anything else in that moment would have been too much for me.
It isn't like I've never lost anyone, but never one so close and so unexpected. Never one I just...thought would still be there for so much longer than he was. I thought he was fine. I didn't have time to prepare. The litany of excuses marches on, I suppose.
I'm tired. And I'm not going to promise regularity, I don't think I'm there yet. The world is still re-ordering itself within my subjectivity. The theoretical understanding that this can happen is still becoming practical. Tomorrow isn't guaranteed for anyone.
If you are still with me, go and hug your loved ones. Remind them that you care. Make that check in phone call.
I'll be around, probably.
Fortune Favors,
Just Robin Today, If You Don't Mind
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