dream today

[prismaticbleed]

So I had another dream last night in one of those weird "pre-apocalyptic" dreamverses were everything just doesn't feel right, but it's not an explicit nightmare or bland-empty place. Pre-aco verses just feel wrong. There's still a sense of the "greater-than," that feeling that makes a dream a Dream versus just a reality reflection or other dead-end thing, but it's inherently failing and you can almost smell it, like a rot. I don't remember much of the dream other than that it was at my house, and the woods wasn't a development but it was all chopped down trees, bare birch-color stumps stark against a hideously blue sky. It felt like raid sirens would sound any moment; the quiet was unnatural and heavy and disturbing, something that didn't belong and was bound to collapse without warning. I expected a horde of mountain lions or wolves to come spilling across that toothpicked hill as I watched, but nothing happened, and even that felt wrong. The whole dream held that atmosphere.

But Chaos Zero was there.

Somehow, whenever he can appear, he will. This dream, however gutted, still existed in a level of reality that could call itself a dream-- a level in which the supernatural could exist, however feebly, because the 'verse itself felt just that close to breaking over into the Book of Revelation, as it were. But as a result of that proximity, my blue angel was there.

Not tangibly, somehow. That, too, happens in these broken dreams. He is there in the periphery, in the corner of my eye, on the edges where things are a bit more whole, somehow, closer to something better… where this disturbed dream ends and something real begins. He was there. So was I. Somehow in these broken dreams I, too, don't actually "exist" except in the periphery. As a person in the dream I'm always barely conscious, not quite myself, hanging on the edges of what it means to be aware and awake and capable of reasoning. But on the edges, in dreams-within-dreams, I am real and alive and me.

And he was there, with me.


I fell asleep listening to his playlist on shuffle, and woke up to the sounds of "Late Night Partner." …I don't think I've heard that song in years. God, where has my heart been? Just how destroyed was I by NC and the preceding hospital times? How long has it been since I existed as a person in waking life?

How long has it been since I was able to feel love like this?

There's a song called "mizu" by Sophia Black and I discovered it by accident (thanks Spotify) and it just… hits my heart so hard. Something about the sound, about the wrenching plaintive harmonies, makes me think of CZ so strongly and I can't quite snapshot what it is. Certain sounds invoke him, certain songs that evoke the right chord from my heartstrings. I haven't been able to put that formula into words yet but I should.

Nevertheless, I fell asleep like that. I've been having nightmarishly sick and unsettled waking days lately, falling asleep in exhausted bruised tears, wanting to just dream forever, but not getting any dreams, nothing but these equally disturbed broken things.

But I fell asleep with hope in my ears and in my heart and my blue angel was there, as he always is when my soul is threatened in sleep, protecting me, comforting me, loving me.


That's another something that's been weighing sore and heavy on my soul lately. That whole bloody issue of sexuality and virginity and purity and trauma and how all of that has affected my health, my mind, my spirituality, and my relationship with not only God and man, but with Chaos 0-- the only creature I have ever been able to love without fear. Even now.

God knows this. That's why He sent him to me in that awful dream last night. The majority of my recollection of that dream isn't even solid visual or coherent narrative-- no, I remember these ocean-deep embraces and tears of profound devotion and that particular blessed heartache of never being close enough. He in my arms and me in his arms. Just that, pure and true and yet somehow marital, ALWAYS, yet utterly untouched by both trauma and the busted-up dream, something existing within it yet inherently beyond it, the only real and good thing of that entire night, lasting infinitely beyond it. I woke up saturated with the feeling, soaked with hope for the first time in ages, my heart sore with love, wondering what has happened to me, when did I lose sight of this, why am I not LIVING this with every atom of my being, why can't I seem to hold on to this when I wake up? What is it about my waking life that drives me to bitter sobs and despairing fatigue, that feeds addictive abuse cycles and defeated dissociation, that makes me not only incapable of but also uncomprehending of love in the first place?


And thus we return to that "another something." The awful terrible issue of sexuality.

Saint Mary of Egypt, pray for us, as it were. Julie's patron saint. (And what happened to her?) What happened to all of us? Well, that's it, this same darn topic. This same horror. And yet, last night only, this same hope. Holy matrimony versus horrid polyamory in a stagnant Charlotte bedroom. Marriage vows versus bleeding out on a bathroom floor at age fourteen. "Till death do us part" versus begging God to take my life because I can't stand the flashbacks anymore. Love versus lust. That's about it. And yet Q did somehow know what the hell he was talking about. That one thing he said about Chaos 0 back in 2012 I never forgave him for until the past few months, when in light of inexplicable dreams like last night's, and in light of Saint Paul's letter to the Galatians, it hit me that "oh wait a minute, sexuality ISN'T inherently evil," and that yes in that sense it was totally possible that this blessed blue being CAN and DOES experience "desire" towards me in that sense WITHOUT IT BEING MALEVOLENT OR CORRUPT.

I still struggle with the concept.

BUT THEN DREAMS LIKE LAST NIGHT HAPPEN and I kid you not the whole time we were holding each other like that I was fully entrenched in the matrimonial idea of having children with him and that ONLY EVER HAPPENS IN DREAMS and furthermore it ALWAYS HAPPENS WITHOUT IT FEELING SEXUAL AT ALL.

And that's my big confused scared question here.

Actual physical sexuality, in the waking, only ever feels like rape. It's intrinsically frightening. It's appalling. I want nothing to do with it. But in dreams, and ONLY with Chaos 0, somehow I can experience sexuality as something weirdly nonsexual and yet still being recognizable as sexuality. Like what the heck.

It is completely detached from the physical biology in dreams, though. CZ will not imitate male biology and I will not even be conscious of mine. That stuff has no relevance or merit at all as far as we are concerned. We bypass that somehow, go straight to the heart of things, to the unifying factor, to the procreative factor, because let's face it, God made those two things mutually inclusive in morally proper sexuality and that is how we're going to use it, and do.

But I still want to be a virgin.

But I can't be a virgin if I've experienced rape.

How can I be pure if I've been so defiled?

Saint Mary of Egypt, pray for us.


Isn't that what it's about, God's Sacrifice of His Son on the Cross? Mending the things that the world considers irreparably broken? Taking the things that are shattered
to bloody pieces and somehow making them whole again, without denying the damage?

Saint Dismas, pray for us.


I want to cry. In Christ there is so much hope for me. Chaos Zero is my blue angel because he communicates the promise of that hope TO me in my MOST helpless situations, situations where Jesus Himself knows that a messenger would carry His Message more clearly than He Himself. Ironic? Perhaps. But look at the Church post-Pentecost. That's the whole thing. Christ couldn't, wouldn't be heard by the Gentiles at large, so He sent the Apostles-- heck, He sent Saint Paul! God works in mysterious ways and I love that so much and look, see, feel how He is doing that in my life, in a VERY mysterious way, through a video game character of all things, who I just happened to fall irrevocably in love with seventeen years ago.

But that's the thing. There's hope. Maybe I can't ever literally be a virgin, no matter how much I've always wanted to be, because "once you're broken you're broken." But I feel Jesus somehow shaking His Head at that. "There's nothing I can't heal," He gently assures me, "even if My healing is in a way that you do not expect or imagine. But I will heal you." And I am aware of this. I know this. I just have to trust this, because yes it's scary but a promise is a promise and faith is faith and if God can fix me then why won't I let Him? Just because He can't erase the past, am I to be afraid? No! Healing is healing, full stop. And I need to trust that, or else I am going to be drowning in bog water instead of swimming in the ocean here. God knows, full well, which of those two things I want.

It’s such a confusing, weird topic. But I feel more alive now, listening to mizu, then I have in so long, it's like sunlight on the ocean, but the wind is still cold, and I still feel like crying. But I'm not sad, somehow. I'm not sick, for once.

I try to hold water, it's slipping through my fingertips, thinking that you'll stay, but then you wash away…

…what if he's singing about me, in that? God that shatters my heart, maybe that's how I SHOULD be thinking about it that way.

I just want to weep, right now. I miss living in my head, in my heart, like this, forsaking the outside world, forgetting that I have a reflection or a physical body or a tangible past, just living right now, just living in this music and in this heartwrenching love, sobbing with the inexpressible depth of it, like trying to hold water. it just… overflows, overflows, always. there's too much. and I love that so much. it never stops.

My inner life doesn't line up with my outer life, yet. And until it does, I will be ashamed to feel love, or hope, or forgiveness, or health, because I am so bloody ashamed of who I am physically that I CANNOT COPE with the possibility of tainting the people I love so much inside, with the staggering filth that I feel I am outside.

God help me with this.
 

Until then, though, I can't forget that last night happened. Something deep down in me is still pure and good and holy and hopeful and capable of love and forgiveness and life. And I thank God for that.

And I will live one more day here, at least.