Closure

She met her new intended love briefly in the dreamworld, and it felt good but odd to let her heart begin shifting so strongly to this man she could barely see and little yet knew.

He receeded back into the fog to give her space to process, and she found herself working with a Hispanic family, trying to help figure out their complicated washing machines to get their many loads going.

But then, their matriarch unexpectedly wrapped her in a playful-yet-strong bear hug from behind and began tickling her mercilessly as one of her own, giving official release from assigned labors.

With them both laughing so hard way beyond norms of society, she desperately struggled until she could get free of the matriarch’s grip, and took her happy, grateful leave of them.

Next, she found herself on a college campus, meeting her ex who seemed open to their patching things back together.

She chatted with him and could feel that old, heavy pendulum swinging back up its usual arc into false hope before it would guillotine back down again and woosh into loss’s tragedy.

When she ran out of things to say as the two of them continued walking for far too long back to an apartment that they were cleaning, she realized that he only spoke in response to her subject comments, never offering more or other topics, nor expanding.

That cold, sickening feeling of flat gray silence returned, and as they arrived, she began disconnecting as passed him while he paused in the hallway.

“You’re not really wanting to continue this, are you?” she asked, daring to finally blast through the lies of his playing along to the contrary.

Then she stopped and turned, looking right at him for the truth, and he at last clearly admitted, “I think that’s obvious, don’t you?”

Turning away again to heavily lift her feet up the stairs, she wondered at all of the years that he’d just played along – and shoved at the pain that his walled-off company had created in her, and that sense of being in a.suffocation chamber she could never break out of.

But at last the illusions were shattering, and his dream self was finally releasing her.

Looking around the disarrayed room, she realized that this time, she could leave another’s self-created mess far behind her.