When I dream about him

She should be unhappy, but I am not guilty and therefore cannot be unhappy.

– from Anna Karenina

The most vivid dreams happen on the weekend, cheating me of much-anticipated R &R. I wake up gasping at six o’clock in the morning. I apologize loudly, to no one in particular, for the disruptive behavior of my excessively imaginative unconscious.  I pull the aptly-named blanket – the comforter – over the sweat beads on my chest and neck, over my feral, panicked eyes and crumpled brow.  I feign indulgent weekend slumber for a few more hours.

At ten-thirty I reluctantly put on a shirt and brave the fifteen-foot trek to the living room. I scan my surroundings, searching for a sign that my emergence from bed today was in fact a mistake. Yesterday’s soup congeals in a bowl on the floor near the couch. My terrier gives it a few inquisitive sniffs before deciding, like me, that it is hardly worth the effort.

A bra and a raincoat dangle from a wooden chair.  Yellow daylight streams in through the window, illuminating the world map of stains on my dingy carpet. I quickly shut the blind. A spider edges along the side of my bookshelf. I give it a ten-second head start before mashing it thoroughly with a copy of Anna Karenina. I briefly muse that the spider is a despondent Anna, and the book a speeding train.

And in that same instant she was horrified at what she was doing. 'Where am I? What am I doing? Why?' She wanted to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and implacable pushed at her head and dragged over her. 'Lord forgive me for everything!' she said, feeling the impossibility of any struggle.

I put on the bra without taking off my shirt. I amble to the bathroom and take a pair of jeans out of the hamper. I wrestle my belligerent hair into a ponytail and shove my neon purple-socked feet into a pair of boots. I forget the raincoat. I always forget the raincoat.

I drive hastily through the blinding rain. I know where I’m going. I head to the only three places sure to deaden the lingering sensation of another nightmare. First, to my favorite Mexican fast food restaurant, where I order an enormous smothered burrito and a large Coke, to be ravenously consumed in my car at a nearby park as the rain drums my windshield. Next, to the bakery, where I purchase two chocolate chip cookies, which I eat slowly and deliberately at Destination Number Three: the clothing store. In the dressing room, as I twirl around in gorgeous spring dresses under flattering artificial light, I am at least ten glorious hours away from the specters of my nighttime psyche.   

I buy two dresses and wear one at home as I clean my apartment.

I spend the rest of the day convincing myself that it was Levin, not Anna, who had it right all along.  

'...but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!'