I dreamed about him last night. I dreamed that we were back at the nursing lab, and he was asking me for help. I blame this on an email I got last night. Someone asked me why I didn’t post about him anymore. How was he doing? Did he get well and move out? Technically, I guess he did. I answered the email as best as I could. This goes round and round. People periodically ask me about him, and I can’t answer their questions. It tears me up, nearly two years after the fact. Some days I call Billy and ask about Connor. Some times I hear Connor giggling and playing in the background. I want to go and visit him. I delivered him, we have that bond. I still remember taking Connor to his daddy, who was partially sedated from kidney stones, and the first thing he said was, “I had a baby? How? I didn’t know I was pregnant! You told me those were kidney stones!” I had to laugh.
I knew the place in my dream last night. It wasn’t the nursing lab, but another school, another place, that many of my dreams take place in. Different subjects, identical building. For some reason, Connor was in nursing school, too. And he was driving the nurses there bonkers.
I woke to the wind chimes tingling in a breeze that I couldn’t feel when I went over to the window. There has never been drafts at that window. The chimes were hung there for the sunshine, not the breeze. Ziggy was watching the window when I woke to the chimes. She was wagging her tail. I still water the plants in that window. I haven’t packed away the chimes, the bottles, the vases, the painted bowls, the rubber duckies that light up when they touch water.
It’s not like he’s ever going to come back and want these things. It would be best if you’d just get rid of them. The plants too!
Today is supposed to be another day. A new day. Yet my mind is focused on things that happened years ago that still haunt me as much as they did the day they happened. I don’t just dream about these things, I think about them frequently. I wonder if there’s not something that I could have done differently, to alter the future. Would I be satisfied if I had acted more but got the same result? Would my dreams be different at night? Or would the ghosts still stalk my halls in the wee hours of the morning?