A Terrible Start to the Morning...

I was having a brief conversation with the Gentleman, and he wouldn't look at me, and he said he was leaving me and getting back together with an old girlfriend, [Christina]. Then he left.

So I was left in our apartment without any money, because he's the one with the job and he had just... left. And I wanted to get in touch with him, but I kept getting distracted. The apartment building had turned into a gutted multistory slum, populated with people having sex in public stairwells and generally being scary in the shadows of the concrete remaining. At least one character from 'The Wire' was there, and being extra snarly.

I kept wandering through it and thinking, I should get in touch with the Gentleman, it's been a day. Where will I get enough money to live on? Then something would happen and I would forget to call him. Whenever I thought of calling him, it was laced through with this numb disbelief that it's been two days, why haven't I called him? Why am I not worried about calling him?

Except that somehow I knew he was not there and would not answer and would not look me in the eye, and that was completely wrong. Even if he did break up with me, he would take my call and help me get out of a scary slum because he is a nice person. So I was both aware of how out of character he was acting, and still completely not phased by it because it was a dream and reality is never quite set.

Then I somehow got out of the dream-slum and into a fancy restaurant set up for a banquet, only I was dressed in rags and the hostess was calling my name like a teacher calling attendance. There was a big tufted chair waiting for me next to my mom and she was mad at me for being late but everything else seemed rather dreamy.

When I sat down, I saw that down at the far end of the table in a party dress was the woman that the Gentleman was leaving me for. And she sat there glaring at me all the way down the table. The Gentleman was not there and I still was terribly upset that he was avoiding me, and still kind of half-sleepily recognized that he was behaving completely out of character.

I guess I woke up during the banquet, and of course, the Gentleman was out of bed because his alarm had gone off fifteen minutes before, which I think means that this entire dream took place realtime after he got out of bed and I sleepily noticed it and went back to bed.

So the thing to do was of course crawl out of bed and into the living room and plop myself onto his lap and tell him the whole story about how he'd divorced me in a dream and it was terrible. The woman he was dating in the dream was not someone he's ever dated, and she's married too, but she does have a fairly impressive glare. A whole lot of the feeling associated with the dream felt very much like the whole fiasco last year around this time with a boss who was being fairly terrible and noncommunicative, which came to a boil and resulted in me leaving that informal internship.

And I'm fairly certain this was all triggered by my normal sleepy mind noticing that the Gentleman had gotten out of bed and left, spinning wild fantasies as to why he was not staying when I had never called out for him in real life.

So yeah, I need some freaking tea.

Misery and the Alotment of Chores in the Coming Years.

My back hurts and my eyes will not unsquint on command anymore. The soapy water is cooling on my stomach where it was pressed against the sink, and I now get to sit down, blessedly, but the situation is quite frankly less than ideal. I hate doing dishes before bed.

Evening is the time for rest, for the burdens of the day to be put momentarily aside in favor of company. Doing dishes is a solitary task- I frankly shoo away people who want to come and visit with me while I'm doing the dishes. It's rough soapy honest work that lends itself to introspection and a good tune. It is not time for chatting. Evening is time for chatting, and I've just done the dishes in the evening for the first time in several years. The contrast has left me dissatisfied and chafed and a bit damp around the waist.

The Gentleman and I have reached a new compact- chores have been allotted and a timeline assigned, which means both our work for this week has just escalated, as well as for next week, and the week after that, and the week after that. It's daunting to have this all stretched out in front of me, ad infinitum, but that's the thing about marriages. There are times when they stretch out in front of you and point towards as much infinity as either of you are going to get, and that's kind of a dark place, to be honest.

To see your life measured out in fortnightly floor washes, knowing that at some point, you won't be washing the same floor anymore, and eventually, you won't be keeping track of the stretch on GoogleDocs anymore, that first the place where you both live will change around you and the tools you use to measure it will shift and stretch as well around the little patch of eternity that you both have laid out in front of you. Because the compact between you will outlast the buildings around you, the cells in your hand, the knees you cushion on a folded towel against the hard floor, will outlast eventually both of you in all your components, and everything in you except the will to keep it going.

It's the humble eternity that measures out the end of you and me and both of us together. Someday we will both be dust, and in the time remaining to us, we'll commit to spending some of it on our knees washing the floor, making the place we live in now a fit place.