12:5:23

I had my first vivid dream about you that I can remember on Sunday night after I lost it at the movies (Pauline Kael title), or what Adrienne Elise calls the “Trigger impending doom” for these final days of the year. I think that I’ve been dreaming about you every night for the past two months, but I can never remember my dreams the next day. In late September, you told me I’d been showing up in your dreams too. Maybe that has stopped now. I wouldn’t be surprised. When I wake up, I know you’ve been there, in my dreams, and in the morning, when my eyes open, the first thought—still—is that you’re not here and it takes me a minute to recover, to adjust to the loss. But I remember Sunday’s dream. I remembered it all day Monday, which never happens anymore. Not for years. On Sunday morning I had a small medical scare, which I think came from last week’s big solar flares. The medics, two guys, came to my house and made sure I wasn’t dying. Monitored my heart and blood pressure. Talked to me and waited with me until I felt okay. For a minute, before they arrived, I thought I was dying. I would never have called 911 otherwise. Never. I had this feeling though I was dying and the ground was moving away, and I couldn’t breathe. And I had the thought, too: “Oh, maybe, I’m dying, and there is no one here.” I am usually calm in moments like this. It’s strange what we are calm about. I called my mom, who lives Upstate, right before the medics arrived, while I waited for them in my nightgown, and told her, “Just in case anything happens, the medics are coming. I can’t breath, my heart is racing, and I feel like I am going to faint.” Her voice instantly changed, dropped into fear. My entire body was red and on fire from some strange allergic flare up that came from nowhere while I was drinking tea in bed. Plus the all-over body aches for a week, throbbing ovaries, and feeling hot all the time. M said her hands flared up on the flight to Mexico, burning hot red. She said we’re all purging. So I lay awake for most of the night on Sunday/Monday, hugging my pillow, upset, nauseous, exhausted, gathering all the pillows around me. Trying to be still. Trying not to be sick. Trying to sleep, but awake in my dark room for hours. In the dream: I remember you were wearing a gold button down cotton shirt. The kind of shirts I always liked best on you, though you’re starting to dress differently now. I think of it as “Post-Masha style.” A reset. You had one, you said, shortly before we met too. Shaved off your beard. It doesn’t quite suit you in the same way, but it is revealing that you’ve changed how you dress again. The tweed jacket at the movies on Sunday. Your haircuts have been shorter, too, which I also don’t like as much. Everything has gotten tight again, more controlled again, like your short hair in old photos, when I didn’t know you. You are hiding your curls again, even though you recently told me that I taught you to accept them. I liked it when your clothes were loose—a bit odd—your hair was longer, your curls looser, eyes were happy and emotional, face was open, top buttons on your cotton shirts open. You were feeling yourself. Thawing. Beauty like a springtime flower. You looked free and happy in those days. I remember I was trying to find you in the dream, driving in a car with a blonde female friend of yours I’d never met—she looked like a giant—and that I made up in my mind. All the friends of yours I do not know. This friend was like some character driving around in The Master and Margarita, or the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland guiding the way. She told me she could take me to you. She appeared out of nowhere, with a car. She was nice, bubbly, warm, talkative, understanding. “Get in.” She drove. Somewhere out of the City. Where are such friends in real life? When we got to the place you were supposed to be, I immediately started looking for you. But wherever I looked, it was like you were behind a one-way mirror, I could see you but you couldn’t (didn’t want to) see me. It was like you were living in some commune—people and friends all around, everything done as a group, except you weren’t talking to anyone. You were surrounded but alone. At one point I asked someone where you were, and they pointed to a pool, the blonde gone after her altruism was complete. But no one was swimming. I dove in, and found you at the bottom of the pool, sitting there. Living there. Underwater. In the golden shirt. No shirt like this exists in real life—the perfect color—I don’t think. But the shirt was not wet, it was dry. I’m still thinking about the shirt now, as I write this. I can still see it. Others were scattered at the bottom of the pool, doing the same: No one talking to anyone. All underwater. A herd life of constant companionship through emotional disconnection and social mitigation. Everyone together but always alone. You used to tell me that was your favorite thing: being alone in a house full of people. I’m the opposite. I want to be directly close and intimate. After I got out of the pool, a woman I don’t know said: “In August, I met my twin flame and had a full kundalini awakening. I've been upgrading faster since. My twin and I immediately went into separation after meeting. He was newly awakened and got very triggered by me. I haven’t seen him since. Your twin should learn more about his Soul. He was on his way, what happened? The Zero Point, where you live from the heart—that will give him real strength. That’s where yours comes from. There are too many people around him. How will you ever get to him?” I shrugged and nodded my head, then left to keep searching. Many other things like the pool scene happened throughout the dream. Me looking for you. You doing strange group activities alone, not talking to anyone. Very focused and very remote. Each time, it was like I was in A Christmas Carol and I was watching the Ghost of Christmas Present. Phantom world. You missing your chances, refusing to rise up out of the water. All through the dream, you never once acknowledged me. You never once saw me. Did you? These kinds of dreams about lost loves have recurred most of my life. So I took note today because I realized you have now entered that old canon of nightmares. The haunted house. It made the dream surface into memory. It made me remember. The lost love object in my recurring dream is: inaccessible, unavailable, out of reach, alienated from me. Another beautiful moment, like the gold shirt (Gold is healing. Gold is holy. Gold is Biblical. Gold is our future), was when I looked at some online book list of things you’d recently read, or wanted to read (I was at your office, on your computer. Again, you weren’t there). The books surprised me. They were all mostly very conventional, mainstream, except for one special book. The title, “Why are your hands healing when they touch me?” The author was Wim Hoff, the German breathing guru. I was happy when I saw that you had bought—or read—such a book. Hoff has never written this book, a book on hands, but you always talked about my healing hands whenever I touched you or you touched my solar plexus with yours. You could never get over my “healing” hands, always cooing over them, always melting upon contact. It was so out of character in a way. A man so resistant to this kind of stuff, so afraid of feelings he can’t control, of the divine, always clinging to the 3D despite what he knows, and yet you could tap into what no one else has about me, or maybe I had not yet ascended to the degree where this energy could be consciously felt by another person in such a direct way. You could feel it, and mostly, you knew what it was and could express it, even though you always posed it as a question, “What’s in your hands, Masha? What is in your hands?” You never thought to answer. But you’re not the answering kind. My hands could reach you, I cannot. The last time you asked me, “What’s in your hands?” it was June, and I told you. The hands are the heart, with chakras and energy centers of their own. I had a thing about your hands too. That’s something I never put together until now—our reaction to each other’s hands. “Magic hands,” I called yours. When I saw the apocryphal Wim Hoff book on your (Amazon?) reading list, in that pile of matrix titles (a web of conformity), it gave me hope in my dream. Just as your connection and reaction to my hands, to us touching, always gave me hope for your healing. For that divine soul/self locked inside you. These are the things that still feel real in the ruin, in the falsity, in the loss, in the terrible gap of bifurcation that has split us. That you let split us. The rest is like you at the bottom of that pool. The surface is fraudulent and everywhere. How are you living down there again? All the people are ghosts in the machine. Everyone is there with you but me. If I asked you this in person, “How are you living down there again, without me?”, you’d yell I was wrong and deny it. You’ve never understood that when you routinely deny and contradict things you previously admitted to, gave reasons for, apologized for, promised, it destroys credibility, it destroys trust, it destroys intimacy, it destroys respect. It makes you indecipherable. It makes it impossible to know or feel what is true. Whenever I’ve talked to you the past 6 months, I seem to leave my body. I’m trying to figure out why. I go somewhere else. I don’t remember what you said, what I said, afterwards. It’s all become foggy. This has never happened to me before. I am normally crystal clear. I am someone who always remembers. I can remember everything about our beginning. The first time the memory-lapse occurred, it was July 11, when we ran into each other on the river, by my house, after you came back from Europe. Minutes before I thought I saw you, but it wasn’t you, then it was. I couldn’t wrap my head around what was happening. It was like I’d conjured you. It didn’t feel real. So when you walked up to me, I was shocked and upset. You put your hand on my shoulder, as you always used to, “I can’t believe I ran into you,” you said beaming, and I felt myself leave my body, sink from the touch of your hand, sink into the ground, which moved from under me because it had become too much. I couldn’t compute the mismatched polarities growing wider, I couldn’t make you understand anything I was saying and feeling, and I couldn’t escape it either because everywhere I went, I saw you. I still see you. What do I do about it? You won’t admit that either. You never admit to anything consistently. We’ve had 23 random run-ins in one year, in different places. It’s still happening. There is no escaping it. There is no way through either. You are a wall. So where can I go to protect myself? On July 11, I felt a tear in the fabric of the timeline, the split reality we are all living through, between the false matrix and the true matrix, and now it had come for us (“Twin flames/sacred unions can’t take place in the false matrix. They take place in the divine matrix.” Kerry K.). The people who know, the people who don’t. The people who refuse to know. The people who know but don’t care. The people who know but can’t handle knowing. On Monday morning, after the dream, I needed to talk to someone I used to know—like really talk to someone, straight from the hip, like old times, no holds barred, in media res. Someone who is as close to my origin story as I can think of, besides my parents. Someone who reminds me that I am okay. That I am good. Someone who will always reassure me of what is true about me, from the beginning. And the person who came to mind, was B, my ex from 25 years ago, who has known me since I was 14 and he was 16. I don’t talk to him for years at a time, normally he gets in touch, sends a sweet, caring message from out of the blue, which is always a kind of balm. But today I felt I should write to him, for some consolation, for some truth, for some confirmation. He responded right away. He’s always been there, in word and in deed, with no hesitation, no matter how much time has passed between us. No matter that I left him. He still remembers my home phone number from when we were teenagers—227-1145, he emailed me the number this morning. We both have a thing with remembering numbers. He’s the only ex I ever talk to. He never gets defensive with me, no matter what I say. One reply read: “Oh dear, Marriage is a thing created by a system and special exceptional people usually don’t fit well with the system—I am not saying that right, but typing fast. Of all the people I have known, I can count on one hand those that really know love and commitment and have a rock inside of their values. You were and remain one of the shining beacons that always shines.You still have your fan club.” I guess, sometimes, a real bond is a bond forever. But God, it’s a miracle when it happens.