moongirl's Blog

I dreamed about my ex last night. I'm pretty sure I've dreamed about him several times recently, but I don't remember the details. In last night's dream, he was sitting with his back to me, shirtless, his head tipped slightly forward. I hugged his shoulders from behind, with my right arm around under his chin, just loosely. On reflection, I know it was meant to be my ex, but the skintone and amount of body fuzz on the back of the neck indicates my current guy.

The last face-to-face convo I had with my ex, he was so nasty I fled in tears. He hadn't been so deliberately vicious for 5 months. He was quite good at being unkind without thinking about it. (I stuck with him much longer than I should have because I loved him in a genuinely deep but addicted sort of way, and he occasionally made the minimum effort required to make me feel like we still had a future.) He rang me a few hours later to apologise. I knew someone would have talked him into doing so but didn't let on to him I knew it wasn't his own conscience acting. A week after our second-last conversation, he was dead.

We had kinda broken up before he died, on my instigation. I never thought I would do that, but the bottom line was I'd had enough of his lies and manipulations. We had a civilised conversation in which I told him I still loved him, probably always would, but he'd let me down too often, had taken advantage too often, and I had decided that I deserved better. He didn't rave at me, just held my hand and said he understood.

When I first tentatively admitted to myself that I couldn't stay with him I had absolutely no idea he was sick. I didn't know he'd need to be hospitalised the week after I told him I wanted out. Thus, when he rang me a few days later to describe his panic attacks, I felt he was attention-seeking, trying to make me uber-guilty, etc. I talked him through the first time, explained that with him being on new medication there would be a "settling in" period, that he'd have some side-effects, probably feel rather vile, and the best thing to do was stay home, in a safe and familiar environment, and ride it out. Patience, I said, was the key. He rang back almost immediately. I'd already put my phone on vibrate and ignored it. Like, what did I have voicemail for anyway?

The next day I learned he'd been so freaked he'd gone to emergency. Not being able to get me, he'd called my predecessor, who somehow still felt enough loyalty (or perhaps compassion) to go sit with him in the ward and ask intelligent questions of the staff. They sent him home after 12 hours, with pretty much the same advice I had given him, but a few days later again, he was admitted, and when I went to visit I was shocked at which ward he was in, and absolutely floored to learn that he was terminally ill and would have known for at least 6 months that he was going to die. He hadn't told anyone.

Naturally I felt pretty shitty, having told him we were splitsville just the week before he went to hospital to die. On the other hand, he'd known he was terminal and didn't tell anyone. If he'd wanted my sympathy, why didn't he tell me? Sure, I'd have been suspicious that it was another of his outrageous lies, but he would only need to produce a couple of his medical reports to convince me. Why didn't he do that? I will never know, because he didn't choose to tell me before he died.

That I'm still dreaming about him means I do miss him in some way, emotionally. It was very strange, right after he died, that I didn't have huge outpourings of grief. Or maybe I did all that in the 3 weeks he spent in hospital before expiring (I did cry a lot during that time). Maybe I was all cried out by the time he died.

So we had our last conversation on the phone, when he rang to apologise. I visited two days later but he was asleep. Three days later he was in a coma. I sat with him for a couple of hours (I don't think he was aware of anything by that stage). Two days later I had a call from my predecessor, telling me it was all over. She was way upset, but I didn't seem to feel anything. I went on not feeling anything for a long time, although I dreamed about him a lot.

With most people I dream about that I used to know, if they're dead IRL in the dream I don't usually know they're dead. With the ex, sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. In a lot of my earlier dreams about him he would be saying something like, "I am dead but I have this special arrangement with the phone company so I can email people," Which was just weird, but made sense at the time (as dreams are wont to do). Which is reminiscent of the closing words of The Secret History by Donna Tartt, where the narrative character relates a dream he had where the former friend says he isn't dead, just "having trouble with his passport". Though, I hadn't read this book before my ex died, so it's not like my dreams of him are influenced by the sequence at the end of the novel.

I think I need to stop now.