So I’ve been talking about how shitty my week has been, but I’ve been dancing around why. A couple of you know, but I really need to get this off my chest and I think my fingertips are the best outlet available to me. I’ve tried talking about it, but the people around me don’t want to hear it, or don’t get it, or don’t at least don’t seem like either of those things. The people not around me are available over the phone, but I’ve never been a phone person.

I’m a little lost, and I think the best thing to do right now is to return to the format most appropriate for the situation.

A dear friend of mine died last week. She has been sick for a long time and was in a lot of pain, but it still came as a shock to me. She was a very private person, so I won’t give her name here, though she was a fellow “blogger”. We’ve been writing together on the same sites for 7 or 8 years? A long time. We met in person a few times, while I was in school and we only lived an hour or two away from each other. I was kind of a dipshit, though, and our friendship ebbed and floed. I suppose most friendships do, but most recently I was thinking that I really could be a better friend to her if I’d just try. I never got around to actually doing that, though. I’d read her entries and not say a word. Usually it was because she surrounded herself with dozens of people who seemed to know better than I did, anyway, so what did she need my input for? Sometimes, though, I was just too lazy to come up with anything that might be helpful or comforting or anything at all.

This isn’t guilt I feel. It’s regret. It’s bitter and powdery and I can’t get the taste out of my mouth. Every time I see any of my friends this week, any time I see any of my repeat patients, every time I see someone in the hallway that I haven’t learned their name yet but they always smile at me, I get scared I won’t see them again, because fuck, how the fuck are you supposed to know?

I don’t think of my friend Mallory as much as I should, though I think of her several times a day now. That day, I did, though, when Nate was feeding his snakes and one of them bit his own tail. You see, Mallory was just telling me about wanting to get a tattoo of an ouroboros. I told Nate that I probably wouldn’t want just any ouroboros, but an AURYN would be nice, maybe directly underneath the tattoo I have between my shoulders.

Nate and I decided to take a shower while we were waiting for the snakes to finish eating, before he had to go to work. While I was in the shower, Mallory called. When I got out, I got dressed and decided to check my phone. I left work early; who knows if they got swamped and needed me to come back. Instead, I saw that Mallory had called. Me. In the middle of the day. My mind immediately jumped to, “Something happened to [my friend].”

I listened to the voicemail and heard the urgency in her message. Yes, something had definitely happened. I called Mallory back. I found out that our friend had died, and I was just in shock. Dizzy, headachey, chilled to the bone. Half of it was the connections my brain was stumbling around to make … I thought of Mallory for the first time in weeks, and she called. I listened to the detail-less voicemail, and knew who it was going to be about. None of it makes sense. I’m tired of trying for it to make sense.

For a week now, I’ve been seeing little messages everywhere. A nickname for her in an Amazon if-you-want-that-you’ll-probably-want-this recommendation. A fortune cookie fortune. Tonight’s random playlist including *nsync’s “Gone” and Collin Raye’s “I Can Still Feel You”. An entry in a blog I read that’s been sitting unread in my Google Reader for weeks but I decided to read it along with the other 150 or so that’ve been sitting there waiting for a break in my schedule long enough to read, and the topic is exactly how she died.

I know it’s more than a little silly to look for messages from the Universe where only coincidence lies, but it’s all I know. And tonight, I’m hoping that by getting all of this out, maybe the messages will stop. I’m tired. I accept that she died. I accept that I’ll never be able to go back and be a closer friend to her. Now, please, leave me alone.

I had a dream a few nights ago that Nate and I and a couple friends from work were at Speedway 95 and Nate told me he wanted to have a baby. I told him that it was neither the time nor the place to be having that discussion.

My friends from work who were in the dream thought it was hilarious.

I had a dream last night that I was in Boston getting married to a guy I went out with a few times (it was so brief that I doubt I ever spoke about Derek). I was all dressed up in my wedding gown, and my sisters and Kaity were bridesmaids, and we were in the drugstore getting something we needed. I saw one of the radiologists there, and she’d dyed her beautiful long blonde hair dark, so that no one would recognize her. I asked her to come to the wedding but she said she couldn’t because someone would see her and she wasn’t even supposed to be in Boston, because she was on call. There was also something about trying to make my dress neckline come down so that I didn’t look so frumpy, but my boobs were covered in disgusting stretch marks.

I told that radiologist about the dream (minus the boobs part), and she was laughing so hard she was crying. It was awesome.

I woke up this morning panicking that my earrings had ripped through my ears in the night. I only have one pair of studs and I lost the back to one of them while putting them in yesterday, so I wore some dangly ones to work and when I got home and went to bed, I opted for some tiny hoops that lock closed. I must have worried that they’d get caught in my hair and not unlock and rip right through my lobes, because this morning I was convinced that’s what happened. Unfortunately (fortunately?), I woke up around 0430 and in my not-awake state, I couldn’t tell the difference between feeling my ears and feeling my nostrils. No earrings there, for sure!

I had a dream that my mother gave me a card that said, “The rock is huge/The party’s a blast …” then when I opened it it said, “…Call off the engagement/You know it won’t last.”

And since then I’ve been in a foul mood.

It must be that my bowels are very proud of the fact that I’ve started pooping at Nate’s, because now I have gone three times this morning.

THREE TIMES OF POOP.

My dad said that if I slept in my own bed more, I wouldn’t have such crazy dreams. I don’t believe him. Also he’s very excited about getting to spend a week torturing Nate at Thanksgiving.

I dreamed last night that I was at the grocery store getting things for dinner, and I saw that there were strawberries on sale. I thought Nate would like some, so I went over to get some, but every carton was moldy. The more moldy containers I found, the more I thought he’d be disappointed if I didn’t find some good ones.

Strawberry

To see or eat strawberries in your dream, signifies your sensual desires and temptation. Strawberries is often associated with feminine qualities and female sexuality.

Mold

To see mold in your dream, indicates that something in your life has been ignored or is no longer of any use. It may also represent transformation and new growth.

I had a dream this morning that I went over to Nate’s and he was cooking dinner. I looked over his shoulder and saw that he was sauteeing something, and I think it was squash. Then the coolest thing happened: I realized I was dreaming. Of course, as soon as I became lucid, I lost it and the dream promptly changed into a weird sci-fi movie/video game replete with alien invasions (the head alien was played by Dean Stockwell, nonetheless), nuclear bombs and Tom Cruise. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was fun to come up with a plan to destroy the aliens, especially when it turned out that one of the bombs wasn’t going to remotely detonate, so Tom Cruise had to stay behind to press the button. There was an almost Prince of Persia-like puzzle element to the thing where I had to determine the exact order the bombs needed to go off in for maximum effect. And then before I woke up, there was a glass elevator/escape pod scene which was thrilling (almost certainly inspired by the end credits to Flight of the Navigator). But what I really wanted was to have a lucid dream.

Oh well. I got a little bit closer, at least. Maybe next time I can hold on to the lucidity a little longer.