I've slowly been settling into my new place. On Tuesday, I will finally have a mattress to sleep on! In the meantime, I've been sleeping on the couch in the living room. Which is okay in the sense that I can sleep pretty much anywhere, but the couch is right next to the front door, which means that I notice whenever my male roommate runs off to his rotations early in the morning.
I have a tendency to wake up earlier if I'm expecting something. So for some inane reason, I naturally woke up at like 5:30 am because I was expecting him to be up rummaging around in the kitchen. And then I realized I was hallucinating sounds, so I tried to go back to sleep, but then he came out of his room at like 6:30 am, and then I feigned sleep until he left. Then I drifted in and out of sleep for like the next three hours as my female roommate came in and out of the kitchen.
All this in-and-out sleep confused my poor brain.
The Anathema has appeared in the night numerous times, but last night was the first time I'd ever dreamed that he was dead. How he died, I can't remember. The only thing I distinctly recall was a conversation with his grief-stricken mother, who was collecting copies of every edition of The Fault in Our Stars in his honor, including some special edition narrated from Hazel's father's point of view (shut up--it made complete sense in my subconsciousness). I should have recognized this was a dream as soon as this ludicrous conversation appeared, but in the midst of it all, I felt a lot of strange, real emotions about this revelation that the Anathema was dead. When I finally woke up, I realized the truth: nothing would change, because in a way, the Anathema is already dead to me.
I lay there on the couch at 5 in the morning, pondering about this. I'm not a fervent believer in the occult, but I do harbor an amused fondness for "weird" things like dream symbolism and tarot cards. I'd told Rogue just a few days ago about the time I visited a witch's house in Durham, and how my professor had drawn the Death Card when we did tarot readings. The Death card is not necessarily a bad card. It symbolizes rebirth, transition, and the start of something new. And in light of the fact that I've just moved to a new place and will start classes in a week...
But the most striking to me is that the Anathema was the one who died. Because on my last day in California, my mother told me that even my father--of all people--had told my mother, "Tell our daughter to hurry up and find a boyfriend. Can't you teach her how to get a man or something?"
God, now even my father is concerned about the fact that I've been single all my life? I was mortified.
People have asked before why I didn't find anyone in college. As if I could control someone's feelings in return. The boat runs two ways. There were interested people I didn't feel anything for, and when I started seeing the signs, I kept my distance. There were others I had a shallow interest in, but not enough for me to do much about it, especially when these people usually had their sights set elsewhere. My answer was always that I didn't find anyone interesting, but I've come to the conclusion that my brain has been culpable.
The Anathema is not a real person. The Anathema is a concept that I became so emotionally invested in, that in the aftermath, I became afraid of feeling something that intense ever again. In reaction to four years of anger, sadness, self-loathing, and small bits of euphoria, I essentially numbed myself for four years after.
Is this the end of the Anathema's reign? Who knows. Thanks to the delirium of drifting in-and-out of sleep, for a while I became very confused about whether or not the Anathema had actually died in real life and even logged onto Facebook to check. In short, I need some caffeine.
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