What My Dream Was

I had horrible nightmares that woke me up on and off two nights ago, and one in particular was so terrible it broke my heart. I dreamt that I destroyed my city, the town where I live and have lived for years, and there was no indication as to why I did it. I was just talking to a friend yesterday about how vivid and disturbing my dreams can be, how sometimes I will have a nightmare so terrifying, I will have to keep checking in with myself to make sure I am really awake. An overactive imagination, combined with my confused emotions lately has equalled three days of  violent, all-too-convincing nightmares. I dream of walking around with my entrails in my hands, trying to figure out how I can reassemble them before I bleed to death. I dream that my mouth is rotting off and that no one can help me fix it. I dream that I am causing thousands of deaths with the click of a button. I am not that into analyzing dreams, but I wish someone could tell me what the hell I can do to just sleep without watching something so unsettling.
The other part of my dream that was even worse was right before I woke up. I had shoved the throw pillow on my bed against my back at some point in my sleep, and in my half-waking, half-sleeping state of mind, I thought it was a person. I hate sleeping alone. The night that Gino told me he wanted a divorce, he asked if I wanted him to sleep on the couch, but I asked him to sleep in the bed with me because this would be the last time I could sleep next to him ever again. It was the last thing I asked him to do for me. The loneliness I felt all day long yesterday was scary to me. I felt sick, sicker than I had felt in months, and for two hours I sat on my couch and cried my eyes out over nothing.
I am starting to get worried that I might have only experienced the first wave of emotion over my divorce, and the rest is held back by a levee that is about to break. For months, I had a strong buffer between myself and all of this hurt. I was surrounded on all sides by so much love and support, and now that everyone has to get back to their lives, that constant support is melting away, and all I am left with is myself. I can, of course, depend on everyone in that network for anything, but I cannot shake the guilt over having to ask any of them to create time to deal with me. Some I cannot reach out to at all anymore because they have withdrawn, and I have to just accept that.
I felt so alone yesterday, and so desperately sad that I actually had to make a list of people I could call if I absolutely felt unsafe by myself. It's a precaution I have not utilized since I was 21, but it's a useful one. Something that they recommend to patients of the psych ward I visited when I was 21 was to actually have a list of people you can call if you feel even a little unsafe, before you think you might be inclined to hurt yourself, or to just call 911 and be re-admitted. I know I won't do anything like that again, but I started to think who would be on my list if I got to that point. Who could I call in tears, who would listen to me sob and hyperventilate for twenty minutes? There were plenty of people who would, but I cared too much about all of them to bother them with something like that. That is where I always stop myself from asking for help- I feel too guilty to bother anyone with something so dramatic. Instead of calling someone I am close to and tell them that I felt too sad and lonely to do anything but cry, I texted my friend Mike about really mundane things until I calmed down and the crying stopped. I said nothing about how destroyed I felt, aside from alluding to feeling under the weather, and it helped for the moment.
After years of feeling safe and secure with Gino, after getting myself off of the medications I had come to depend on so heavily and not even feeling the need to speak to a therapist again, I am seeing that I might not be able to do this on my own. I can deal with physical pain, and lots of it. I proved that when I broke my fibula in three places and still walked around on it all night, wincing and limping but never asking someone to drive me to the hospital. Physical pain is understandable to me. It is the emotional, internal pain that I cannot understand.
I rewatched Angels in America this week, for the millionth time, because I had not watched it in years, and was thunderstruck, once again, by how much I could identify with the sentiments certain characters expressed. Something Al Pacino's character, Roy Cohn, says to Belize, his nurse in the hospital, stuck out for the first time. Referring to AIDS, which he has just recently found out that he is infected with, he says, "Course they can't kill this, can they? No. It's too simple. It knows itself. It's harder to kill something if it knows what it is."
It is not the same by any stretch of the imagination, of course it's not. I am not dying from an unkillable virus, and it is not 1985. I am not sick, not dying, even though I feel like I am most of the time. Still, the language he used was what got to me. Heartbreak cannot be erradicated, it is not a disease that can be treated. It knows itself, knows what it wants. The reason I have lost so much weight, why my irises are rimmed with dark, gray lines and my face is paler than normal is because I have been run over by grief. The high I felt for the whole month of July was false hope, and the elation of moving out of my hiding place at Tony's house and into my new apartment. The high has lasted through most of this month because of the new information I came to know about how Mike feels about me, and it's wearing off now because of the mess of confusion that has erupted around me since learning it. I like him and he likes me, and the more time I spend with him, the more I want to spend all of my time with him, and that is not a good idea for either of us. I am trying with everything I have to understand the grief, to identify my enemy so that I can fight it, but it is evasive as anything and won't show what it is, or what it wants. It knows itself, but I do not know it yet.
Another part involves Mary-Louise Parker's character, Harper Pitt, as she hallucinates through her grief over her failed marriage to a gay man. She sits in an imagined Antarctica, talking to her imaginary travel-agent friend, explaining how it feels to be heartbroken, "I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you. There's your breasts and your genitals... They're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs. They don't get it, they just want him. Want him."
Of course I see truth in that for the first time ever. I have experienced loss, but I have never truly had my heart broken this way. I have never been told by the person that I love the most that they do not love me. This is the part of going through a breakup that no one prepares you for. You feel dead, but you are still alive, and just when you think the waves have stopped crashing over you, the tides rises again. It has felt like two months of no oxygen, a few weeks of breathing, and now my head is underwater again. The other part that hurts even more is how much my body still misses his, how much I would give just to be able to sleep in a bed with him again. This is why my dream terrified me the most right at the end, when I thought maybe the past three months were the dream, and I was waking up next to someone who I loved, and still loved me. Waking up, holding onto myself for dear life, I felt more empty and alone than I ever have, like a starving animal trapped in a forgotten well. This is real grief, not the brave face I have been showing off to everyone. I keep it to myself, because this is the face no one needs to see. This is the face I only show to myself.