safe keeping

Do you ever look at your dog and think we accept each others differences.

This is such an odd thing. The part that's odd isn't that we live domestically with these animals. The weird part is the fact that I just realized this. How have I gone this far in life not seeing the amazing reality that is "humans".

We humans have learned how to keep all sorts of animals as pets. They sleep in our beds. We pick up after them. We talk to them. We laugh together. We play together. We think about them nonstop. We make sure they have all the necessities. We make sure they are comfortable and happy. And we cry thinking about them leaving us one day.

My dog and I get along. We look at each other and chat, sometimes telepathically. She cuddles with me. We go on walks together especially when she's begging me to get the leash and she knows I don't have time to walk her but I do it anyway. We share food from time to time. She hears me crying and singing around the house. I can tell when she's sad. She barks when I tell her to get the cat outside.

But don't you understand why I am so fascinated by this? She is so different from me. Look at a dog. They have fur, a tail, four legs...they can't even speak like we do. Their brains don't work like ours do. And yet we both have smell, sight, touch, taste, and hearing. We may have varying degrees of senses, but we have all the same.

We get along despite our differences. We learned how to work with the other. One talks too much and the other is really good at listening. One does all the work while the other lays around the house all day. And yet we love them just as much and they love us back.

I thought about this as I remembered my dream from last night...the lobster one. Remembering an ex usually means going back down memory lane for me. I don't really remember they way they smell or felt when I held them, but I do remember places we went together and things we did. I remember jokes we shared and fights we had. I remember the way they made me feel especially when they made me feel sad. I also remember all the times they made me so happy I cried.

It's funny how the brain works. If I tried understanding why I just wrote any of this just now, my mind would explode. I know there's a way this all connects. I just don't have the capacity to figure out how.

I guess all I want to say for now is that we can learn to love something that doesn't even look like us or talk like us or even think like us. Relationships must have more to them than time. The amount of time we spend with someone shouldn't affect the way we love them. We can love our pet immediately upon meeting them for the very first time. We love them completely and we know we will take care of them, even when we don't know that they'll love us back.

Why don't we do this with other people?

05:00

My dream involved a dizzying ride where the elevator in a building was one of those spinning roller coasters. Both my exes, which I usually confuse the two in my dreams because they interchange, were there begging me to be theirs again. I took back one of them only to realize I made a huge mistake. He hadn't spoken to me in months and when he felt like it, he could have me again? I don't think so. As I sat at dinner with him at the most crowded restaurant telling him how I don't want to be with him, the other ex was sitting in the background having dinner with a cooked lobster. No, that isn't a metaphor. A real cooked lobster the size of a human.

It was funny to me in the dream, but now that I'm awake I feel the terror in my heartbeat. That was probably the worst nightmare ever. I woke up with the blanket wrapped around me. I tossed and turned so much that it gathered around my tiny body and suffocated me. That's how I was feeling. Suffocated. But why am I having these dreams now? Because I briefly talked about them yesterday?

Maybe it was something my mom said. "What would you do if he asked you right now? What if he wanted you back? You wouldn't take him back?" I replied no very easily. "What if you saw him out with another girl? You wouldn't care?" Again I say no only this time not as quickly. I had to think about it briefly, checking in with myself to make sure I wouldn't lie. I have come a long way from my obsession with him and I'm finally happy with spending time on my own. I have already forgiven him for his behavior and even forgave myself for mine. I'm not that girl anymore who revolves her entire world around someone else, someone who doesn't even give her the attention or the effort she deserves. It actually makes me sick to my stomach to remember how I used to behave around him. I wish, I wish I wasn't that person for such a pivotal part of my life. But I was. And now I can move on. So why haven't I?

Dreams probably don't mean much anyway. I've just been stressed out lately. Lots going on.