overboard
dreams and nightmares and abandonment
I am on a boat. I was on a boat. I am overboard now, and I don’t know if I was pushed off or if I jumped of my own accord or just agreed to walk the plank. Either way, I am in the water and it’s cold and dark and I bob up and down with the movement of the ocean. I gasp for air, I go under, come back up, gasp again. I wait for someone to come, someone in a lifeboat whose sole purpose is to rescue me, but it doesn’t happen and the darkness somehow gets darker, and I forgot how to swim.
I have this dream about three times a week and it varies from night to night. Sometimes I swim, but I go in circles. Sometimes I drown; I feel myself falling through the water, heading toward the bottom, and when I reach it and I can hardly hold my breath anymore, I find myself touching down in my old bedroom from when I was a teenager. Sometimes in the dream I tread water for what feels like hours, calling out names I don’t remember upon waking. No one ever saves me. I never make it to shore. There are no happy endings in these dreams and I wake up gulping down air, sweating, thrashing around in bed.
My dreams have all been nightmares since he left. Sleep is where I sort things out, where the feelings I keep down during the day vomit themselves up during the night. I dream I am lost in the woods. I dream I am in a maze. I dream of the dead chasing after me, I dream that we are back together but he’s drinking again.
I can easily analyze all of these dreams. I know they mean I am not over him yet, I am not moving on, I am, in essence, lost. No one is coming to help me, to drag me out of the ocean, to get me out of the maze, to make me feel whole again. It’s entirely up to me to swim my way to land.
During the day, I feel okay. I go to work, I busy myself, I don’t think about it all that much except when I’m thinking about it all the time. It’s always there in the back of my mind, a little nagging voice that begins all its sentences with “if only.” If only you paid more attention to him. If only you talked more. If only you were a better partner, a better wife, a better person. It has all somehow become my fault. These are also the things I think about while I am paddling the ocean in my dreams, while I am walking through the maze or the forest or feeling lost in my childhood bedroom. I wish I could quiet that voice, but it seems to grow louder each day. It makes me rehash my entire marriage, looking for clues, looking for signs, looking for things that might not even exist. I am looking for ways to blame myself, for proof that he wasn’t wrong to leave.
I do this because it feels somehow better to say I failed him than he failed me. I am forever defending him, because to lay the blame on him is just another sort of failure. I chose wrong. I married badly. Again. I know on the surface I did nothing to deserve all this, but deep down, I’m not so sure.
I will keep having these dreams and nightmares as long as I keep myself from healing. And I don’t know what to do in that regard. I have moments where I’m fine, where I think about dating again, about getting out there and meeting new people and having fun. I have moments where I’m content with being on my own. I have moments where I hate him and I’m angry at him and I recognize that I have every right to those feelings. But it’s somehow easier to turn those feelings on myself. I sit with those feelings, fester in them, until I go to bed and dream of being overboard, of drowning, of being abandoned in the water or forest.
I don’t want to dream anymore. I want to go to sleep and welcome the darkness and not recreate my emotions as nightmares. I don’t want to be overboard, but I don’t want to go back on the boat, either. I’ve got to learn to swim.