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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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