Rosetta Stoned

So about a week ago I had, what in my singular estimation could only be called, a highly vivid dream about my ex girlfriend Emily. Dream perhaps, or nightmare perhaps, I do not know. I awoke and felt really shaken, like somewhere inside of me was a feeling that a flicker of life was gone and that I should be sad. I did feel bad, I felt sad, I felt as if a part of me had actually died, perhaps I left a part of myself inside my dream and when I awoke the door to bring this conciousness closed and it was forever lost. That is the feeling I had when I woke up.

And in that moment where you first wake up and you do not have your bearings, for a split second I actually have to ask myself why I feel so empty. But just as quickly as I questioned my new unknown emtional loss of being, I recalled the dream, which seemed nothing short of a vivid memory that I was mulling over in my head. For a time this particular morning it was no longer a dream but rather a memory, once that I might have staked my life upon being something I really, truly experienced. It was so powerful that even once I poured my morning coffee and was driving to work, I still felt the inner workings of my mind going over the scenario over and over and over, trying to detail every last aspect of the dream. From my personal experience it seems that the intricasies of a dream fade as time passes from my own inital recognition.

In my dream I was standing over her body, I was looking down upon her as she exhaled her last breath. She was pale white and even the color had run from her lips as if it was trying to hitch a ride on her soul as it was departing her body. Her chest caved and sank as I could hear the final exhalation of breath, a hollow sound that sent chills through my body. And it was cold, freezing, so cold that I was shaking, but that may have been caused by my reaction to this scene. I could see the last heated breath stream out of her mouth and then nothing, nothing at all. Only stillness. Stillness until I fell to my knees, as if in defeat and in total and utter despair, tears creeped up and out from behind my eyes as I held my hands to my face as if maybe by some bleak chance God himself my hide this from my vision and when I looked back she would be alive.

I knelt there next to her body, which was still, and began rocking back and fourth. Her head lay at my knees, and I was hunched over, having moved my hands from my face and placed them on her own. She was so cold, but I could not let go. I looked down and saw everything that I loved, everything that was important to me, I watched it perish and there was nothing I could do. As I cried harder I ran my fingers across her face, feeling her lips and her soft cheeks that were now ice cold, over he eyelids, across her forehead and up to her scalp. I finally opened my eyes to look directly down upon her and see her face with tiny trickles of liquid on it from my tears.

I called my father and he came over. For some reason he said we should bury her, thats the part I don't get. I don't remember anything in the dream that reminded me of civilization, so perhaps it was set in the extreme past. But he said we should bury her, so after I stopped crying we got some shovels and went out back. As we dug I caught site of her body, which my father had brought outside in preperation for burial. When I saw it I broke down again, this time just collapsing into the mud, tears streaming down my cheeks. My father told me there was nothing I could do, and he continued to dig the entire grave on his own. There was some sort of unspoken knowledge that my father had had to bury my mom in the same manner, and he had gone through something just as terrible, and he tried to bear my burden of sorrow.

He finished digging and helped me lower her in, loosely covered in sheets to shield her. I stood there in the cold, dark night, as I watched my father he bury the only person I ever loved. I don't know why she died, or how, only that she did, and only that it felt real.

"It was so real, like I woke up and walked around
Also a bit terrifying, I don't want to be alone when I tell this story
Overwhelmed as one would be, placed in my position
Such a heavy burden now to be the one
Born to bear and read to all
The details of our ending"