My Dreams Are My Enemy

Haunted by an ex

This isn’t a fancy article for a publication. This won’t be proofread. There are loads of typos. It’s just a raw dump of what’s been in my brain for sanity’s sake. Maybe the content will eventually fuel a formal submission, but for now…this isn’t it.

Dear Diary…

I’ve got an article I submitted to another published that’s been pending for days. I’m kind of annoyed. I feel like I can’t submit a follow up to it until that one is published.

Last night, I dreamed of Jeremy, the guy I dated for 9 months and then things ended in a humiliating way.

It’s bad enough that I think about him during the day. I fight the thoughts but they’re intrusive. Sometimes I think about ways that I miss him and our connection. Other times I’m angry and hurt.

I’m angry that on the same night that things ended, I told him how my parents never told me they loved me when I was a kid (the topic was about him and my religious parents, all of which was just an excuse). That was so painfully private.

I hate that for almost a year, I was with a guy who I knew was out of my league. Unfortunately, I manifested the end result despite my outwardly image of being The Cool Girl. It hurts that for a brief moment, when he talked about blending families and living together, I had hope. Hope. I felt like my life was where it was meant to be after the divorce.

I don’t want hope. I give up on hope. I had hope that after my divorce that my life would be better but I’m struggling with other issues, so the net difference is the same except I’m poorer and I don’t see my kids every day.

Things ending with Jeremy burned my desire for hope. Hope makes you believe in positivity for the future. I’m done with that.

Am I back to where I was during my marriage? Crying on the bathroom floor, thinking that all I need to do is raise my kids and then die?

Back to my dream and yes, I acknowledge that hearing someone else’s dream is the absolute worst. “Thanks for telling me a series of nonsensical, made of things that didn’t happen so a complete stranger could be telling me a story and it wouldn’t be any different.”

We were broken up but Jeremy came over with his youngest son. I think he was packing things to take with him. He was happy, cheery, and full of jokes as usual. I’ve never met his son in real life but there I was, chatting with him. Some other random things intermixed with the dream, but it was so real. Eventually, Jeremy finished whatever he was doing and then left.

Even in my dreams, I’m somewhat aware I’m asleep. Last night was a rare moment where it felt so real that when my alarm went off, I was utterly confused for five minutes.

I haven’t seen Jeremy since April (or whenever the breakup was). It’s August right now. To feel like I was in his presence, that we were interacting, it’s like him leaving in my dream feels like the breakup all over again.

I hate that I’m fucking crying over someone who was cruel and thoughtless when things ended. To be clear, a good chunk of the pain from the breakup was the “how” of it all.

Heartbreak is the absolute worst.