I dreamed again

And my sister was there.

I hadn't seen her in a while. It's been maybe six months since she last appeared in my dreams, but over the past few days she's been showing up again. Usually this indicates that I'm going through a period of re-processing my grief—at least that's what my therapist has told me—which makes sense given that I'm anticipating returning to reunite with family in June and celebrate her 30th birthday. A month after that will mark four years since she left us.

We mostly speak about suicide in cliché. The pain she felt simply meant she couldn't go on anymore but even so it's so hard to imagine what you're going through and God has a plan for all of this even if you can't see it yet; even though we don't see it yet we can at least rest knowing that she's in a better place now. We rest on aphorism because no part of the experience makes any sort of rational sense whatsoever so our language fails us when we try to unpack it.

My sister wasn't surprised to see me in the dream. It was more like she'd been waiting. When you're dead time doesn't really mean anything, so you can just kind of show up in people's subconscious whenever you feel like it and depart at your leisure. The first Christmas after she left us, she showed up in my dad's dreams. She stood there, silent, as he reached out to embrace her. As his arms closed around her, she vanished.

This time she was happy to see me again and more than willing to stick around and talk for a while. It turns out she's missed me just as much as I've missed her and she's excited about everything I've been able to do since she left. She wishes she could be with her daughter but keeps watching her grow, proudly, from a distance. The fear and the pain aren't there anymore. Plus she gets to hang out regularly with my grandpa, who is now free of his own pain, and they get to celebrate their (shared!) birthday every day.

The whole family sat down and had dinner together, just like we used to. And because it was a dream there was of course a goofy plot twist where I learned at the dinner that my body had also been dead all along—BWAAAAH!—but my consciousness was still preserved somewhere and there was a chance at rebooting myself in real life. (I've been playing too much Marathon lately.)

So I woke up and sat in bed with the very clear, very realistic memory of simply standing there talking with my sister, just as we had done for years. And I don't know how to describe the feeling.

The first place my brain wants to go is to intellectualize the experience: it was simply a fantasy that manifested my subconscious desire and anxiety with the capable assistance of 10 milligrams of escitalopram.

But in equal measure, I can tell you that my sister was there. And not just present, but vivid and healed and happy. Maybe it's just that the piece of her that I carry around in my memory, and my relationship to that memory, is healing as I continue to process the trauma of longstanding loss.

I don't know. But I'm glad we had a chance to talk again.