To Sleep: Perchance to Dream

I am quite anxious and uneven. Forces are against me… or just in pain.

I have gone through a transformation, a metamorphosis of a dark kind. I am not the same me I was at the beginning of summer. Something happened to me to change me, and I can’t change back, though I need to. Seeing and talking with one of my abusers has damaged me in incomprehensible and enigmatic ways. It has consummately broken me. I don’t know how I’ve changed; I just know I’m not the same. Feelings of uselessness, worthlessness, and sadness are more profound than ever. There is no crack in the casing.

I had another dream of abuser X three nights ago. The damage still lingers, the hurt still staggers around inside my beleaguered soul. The dream is hard to recall now, but the stain of its imprint is irremovable. He is as close to me now as he was then.

I woke up sick on my stomach. The dream kept refreshing itself in my head, playing again and again. There was no escape. I went to an EDA meeting where the focus was on how to handle people and food for the holiday. Benign topic in its own right. But one of the group members brought up how she was to see her abuser over the holidays, and my dream came back to me with all the hurt and sadness with which it could dominate. I began to cry in the middle of group, in the middle of twenty people. I could not restrain the tears, so I left group to cry it out and then rejoin. I sat on the floor in a dark, private room and sobbed the most heart-wrenching tears to ever know an existence. Time elapsed and slipped into a trance. I don’t know for how long. I made my way back to the concluding group, make-up-less and empty. Fortunately I had plans with Elle who let me be myself and cry on the way to our lunch. I told her why. It didn’t matter much to me for her to know. Nothing mattered at the time.

As with all tears, they eventually found their stopping point and I was left alone till the next day when I was driving to work and all thoughts, memories, and tears flooded back. And even as I recall the recalling, I am tearful because I know I’ve lost something in all this mess. I’ve lost me, a me I didn’t even want, but a me I would rather have back. Something more than this broken limbed, empty stuffing, torn-apart rag doll.

And I don’t know that it even matters any more. I thought he couldn’t take anything else away. But even in my dreams he’s the winner, and the winner takes it all.

And I don’t know how to take my next breath. It won’t come naturally. I have to remind myself to breath.

And I don’t know what to do with all this. Therapist says to write about it, but what good does that do? There’s nothing to process. I don’t know why I’m crying. I don’t know why abuser X is bothering me now. I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

“To sleep: perchance to dream” is from Hamlet and is about suicide, which is entering the crevices of my mind more and more.

In the end, it doesn’t even matter. I ’m already gone.