Our alternate life together [Kitten’s Eyes Only]

I woke up a little over two hours ago (2:40 am), having visited us in the alternate reality where we did meet each other first. I need to write this down, so that perhaps I can go back to sleep having purged it.

The moment I visited, the vignette I experienced, occurred about 10 years ago. We were on our farm. Yes, we had acreage. You had your animals, both livestock and dogs. It was late summer, and we were walking on the property. You were playing catch with our first born, our son, who was about 10 years old. I had just answered my cell phone, and was talking to an apparent telemarketer.

This gets a bit weird. In this reality, it was commonplace for “grief memorial” firms to sell something, I don’t know what, to memorialize your loved ones after they passed, after a “respectful” period of time for you to grieve. That’s what this call was. They had my name correct, and the name of our daughter Sue, who had died 3 years earlier at the age of 5. I was far from recovered from that grief, though. After several minutes of this person trying to convince me to buy this memorial, her boss (I think) got on the phone and started to berate me for being so upset about the call. “After all, it’s been 20 years, you should be over it by now!” When I told him it had only been 3 years, he suddenly announced they had a wrong number, and hung up.

That’s when I woke up. There is more that I know, from memories that came back with me. But first, I should note that I woke to a pounding headache, the last vestiges of visual aura, my left arm clenched up tight to my face, and pain radiating down that arm. I may have had a partial seizure. I took some ibuprofen, and the headache has eased off. My arm is still sore.

The more I know, and some things I don’t know: There was no guilt or anger about how our daughter died. Just grief. Grief profound enough that I am still in tears as I write this. I don’t know how she died, but I do know it was not our fault, and there was nothing we could have done to prevent it. I know we had waited until our 20’s to have kids. You were about 25 when our son was born. I don’t know his name, as the events of the vignette didn’t include it being called. Sue came along two years later. There were no other children, and there was no possibility of there ever being more.

We were very happy together, and had mostly moved on from our loss. I became so upset mostly because it hadn’t been that “respectful period of time” and the telemarketer shouldn’t have called. The call brought the emotions flooding back. I know that other than that, we had both accepted what had happened, and it had only made us closer.

This was more than just a dream. I was there. This was real, or as real as crossing the boundaries of space and time to visit an alternate reality can be.

ETA: Sleep still eludes me.