One Month

K.B. with her horse

It's been a month since my friend K.B. died. In some ways, I can't believe so much time has passed already. In others, it feels like it was just yesterday.

If you knew K.B. well, you would know that she really loved animals, especially horses. For a time, she part-owned a horse in Regina. I, myself, haven't been on a horse since I was in early high school.

You might also know that she was fascinated by dreams. (Dreams really are a strange phenomenon, I must agree.) The fiction she had begun writing on her blog concerned "dream guardians."

Here is her first entry in the story she was working on:

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Everyone dreams. Or at least they used to, and it mattered. Perhaps I should start this whole tale with “once upon a time.”

Once upon a time everyone dreamed. They remembered their dreams, they talked about their dreams and it mattered. Not in the needing-a-good-night’s-rest sense of the word but rather in a world-with-end sense of the word. This may seem an extreme statement to you, but I can assure you that the real flesh and blood world we live in only exists as it does because the not so flesh and blood world of dreams exists. Symbiosis, and most humans aren’t even aware that this is how our world works.

There are doorways between the two. Some people go there when they dream, but – so far – very few from the world of dreams and nightmares have made the journey here. And the reason it is only a few is because there are guardians out there standing watch, protecting us. Gatekeepers. This was a surprise to me too, but I can tell you that as fewer and fewer people dream, and work on remembering their dreams, the harder it is to keep the doors from being breached. And if the doors become open on both sides then every creature ever dreamt of – including those that haunt our nightmares – will come pouring through; they hunger to be real. And that would be both the beginning and end of everything.

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So, how very right was it that, on Saturday morning, I dreamt of her? Or, should I say: she visited me in a dream. And better yet: there was a horse.

In my dream, we were riding a horse. I was tucked behind her, with my arms holding her waist as the horse moved slowly, gently.

She asked me how I was doing.

I said I was okay and started telling her the many things I've saved up to tell her since she passed. And then I realized that she was dead. And I cried against her back and told her that I miss her.

That's all it was.

I don't care if it was a "real" visitation or if it was just the power of my grief working itself out through my dreams. I don't care. I felt her with me, and that was enough.

Pinned on Pinterest
via my found-through-K.B. friend, Bronwyn
of the blog I, MayB