i wake up in the morning and check my email, to find a message that R has suddenly died.
i suppress the news and go have a stressful conversation, in which an ex is getting married and, even though they would normally have invited me to the wedding, they decided not to, because they don't want me to be upset.
this irritates me on many levels. they seem to be assuming that, somehow, i would have wanted to marry this person, so they thought the wedding would make me feel sad and left out of marriage. now generally my irritations at weddings are at the institution of marriage itself, and i am rather insulted that the person thought i would ever want to get married.
so i grump and growl and am noncommunicative, and when they ask me why i am being so unreasonable, i remember that R is dead, and tell them that, and leave and go back to my room and fall asleep.
several times repeated, i wake up remembering this news, realize i am waking up and hope that it was simply a dream. subsequent events—usually involving me going online and checking livejournal—prove me wrong.
in the last of these scenarios, i am for some reason staying in R and S's guest room, even though i have never met them face to face. S comes into the room (this is the first time we are meeting), and i am hopeful that it was all a dream, but i am wrong. we sit on the edge of my futon and he talks about R.
then the doorbell rings and i wake up for real to pick up a package from fedex.
then i go back to bed and fall asleep again, only to slide back into this dream. this time, S and various of his friends are staying at my place, and we are walking for miles on end throughout new jersey, finding out of the way wooded places and unusual restaurants, and talking about what we could do for a proper memorial to R's life.
then soren calls me by a female name, and then one of the friends calls me by that same name and calls me "she," so i start yelling at him and threaten to beat him up if he believes that or ever says it again. this is particularly upsetting because i was rather liking this group of friends, until then.
then i wake up.