Princess Tiger Lily, Extra Room, N Cutting Up

        I had a rough night getting to sleep, and then some emotional dreams. The first was that Princess Tiger Lily had come back to visit. Her rough fur and loud purr are very different from the other cats. She came and snuggled up under my arm against my side and got face rubs and pets for several minutes. She didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that she’d been dead almost two years, so I didn’t let it bother me after a couple of moments. 

I woke up from that dream, well, I dreamed I woke up from that dream to find than N was getting ready for work. She was trying to be quiet, and didn’t have any lights on. I noticed, however, that there was light coming from behind the shelf of the closet. The thin shaft of light was hitting me directly across the eyes, so I got up to see what it was.

A thin line went from floor to ceiling in the closet, like the edge of an open door. I pushed on the wall, and it opened up like a door. There was a small room with an overhead light in the ceiling, much like the light in our entry way. There was a small window and an exterior door.

I pushed my way past my clothes and into the small carpeted room. It had a closet, and the floor was carpeted in a dusky rose carpet (Like what was in the house when we moved in.) There was some sun fading in an arc where the sun came through the small window, which seemed to be mostly shuttered off.

“N, did you know this room was here?” I called out into the bedroom. N didn’t respond. I poked my head back through my clothes, to discover that N had left the room. It looked like I was still sleeping in the bed. I turned back to the room, there were now a couple of toy chests in the room, one black and one red, about the size of the orange/brown toy chest that is up in the garage rafters. I opened the door, half expecting it to open into some other world, but no, it was just our back yard. The door closed behind me and vanished.

I ran around to the front door and came in the house, asking N, again, if she knew about the room behind our closet.

“You’re dreaming.”

“No, it’s there, come look,” I took her by the hand and lead her back into the bedroom. The door in the back of my closet was open enough to see the light coming through. The room was full of red and black ceramic bathtubs and toilets this time.

“See, I told you, you are dreaming.”

And I knew I was dreaming, so struggled to wake up to tell N about the funny dream I just had. N was still making her way around the room getting ready for work, or so I thought. I heard the sound of scissors going. I sat up, asking “What are you doing?”

“C needs some stuff to sew, and I wanted these pants patched for a steam punk costume.”

I noticed that N had cut holes in the pants, and was now cutting apart one of my show paintings for patches.

“You could have sewed the patches over the whole pants, you didn’t need to cut holes in them.”

I pulled the canvas out of her hands to see which one she was cutting apart.

“You don’t have to yell at me!”

“I wasn’t yelling. Go ahead, I thought I’d tossed this years ago,” I handed back the painting.

“You aren’t mad at me?”

“Not for that.”

“What then?”

I grumbled that I didn’t want to talk about this in bed. N got out of bed.

I admitted that I was unhappy about her more frequent ‘stoner stunts’ and that I needed more sex.

“Why do you always turn arguments into what’s wrong with your life?”

“Um, you asked?” Was apparently the wrong answer. N stomped out of the room, flinging the painting against the sliding glass door. Our blinds slowed it enough that it didn’t break the glass.

I laid back down. As soon as my head hit the pillow I realized that N was getting dressed, and that I was dreaming, still. It was weird, for a moment I was on my back and on my chest at the same time.

It took a couple of moments to realize that I was really awake.

Ad astra per technica,

FF