Yesterday my daughter had her first communion. It was a lovely occasion and a new tradition to me. As I was raised Protestant, I was confirmed at 14. I was baptised during the same period, as I hadn’t been baptised as a baby or small child. This fact alone gave me suspicion about the entire ceremonial process, the function of the church and religion, as I wondered how and why my parents came to it so late that I was baptised at 14. I am realising now that I no longer can just ask them. This is how grief continues to sneak up on a person. These little moments when you’re like, oh I’ll just ask… but wait, I can’t, that’s no longer an option. Perhaps I can get to the point where I am clear enough in my dreams to ask them there.

Dreams, again, are why I’m here today to write. Exhausted from a weekend of first preparing and then socialising, I went back to sleep this morning after dropping the kids to school. My dreams took me so many places. I was once again back in my childhood home. I was arranging the lovely entry nook, which was never made lovely while we lived there, it was always left a dishevelled mess. I now have the sudden urge to clean and arrange things in my house now, but I ignore it and choose to keep at work here, instead. There was nothing wholly remarkable in these dreams this morning, but instead I feel rattled, off balance, by the way I moved through them. There were many fragments of dreams – storylines and places I’ve been before – all mixed up, like someone was changing the channels on an old TV, yet I was living them all.

I was waiting for them to come home, my parents. This is what I remember from the main dream; the station I kept coming back to. I was waiting on a bright, soft summer day, not unlike this one today, making things nice, happily. It was a slow, easy feeling of making things just right, not the rush of doing it before visitors arrive, like this past weekend. It was the pleasure of taking the time to do something, enjoying the process, enjoying the sun through the woods outside, the fresh summer air filled with enchanting fragrances wafting from one direction and then the other. With the whisper of the wind through the trees and the birds calling, it was the kind of day to lay in the grass and bathe in sunshine, to stare at the clouds and look for shapes, to close your eyes and feel the sun on your skin and and the soft wind cool you and kiss you as it passes by. It was a perfect day, a day to never end, a day that you always remember, as the memories of each day like this blend into one and each time, if you are lucky enough, that a day like this returns you are reminded of what it feels like, and felt like before, and it is bliss.

I remember a day in early May in Chicago, I was with my boyfriend, another boyfriend who I clung to for dear life, as he did me, knowing not what else to do with a kindred spirit, except to try to be together as a couple. This day in early May was so perfect, coming at the end of a long, dark, cold, sad winter that seemed to have no end, that it seemed to spring out from the earth with a glorious leap, all at once, exclaiming that the winter was finally over and we could all live again. The winds were still strong but finally warm, and caressed the soul of a city and its people, who were all drawn together by the act of mere survival of its hardest season, and had all, somehow, again survived. So we too rejoiced, just stayed outside, skipped classes and went close to the lake. I remember walking all the way there through the city streets and its magnificent architecture, the sunlight forming majestic shadows and light not seen before. In the park by the lake we lay in the soft green grass and basked in the sun and swam in our love for each other. We’d found each other quite by accident. I’d wanted to film or photograph something. He’d hosted at his loft and no one else showed up. We spent the day and evening together and he kissed me as I left. I was quite surprised, as I hadn’t really thought about it before it happened which was probably why it was so nice. I was my regular amount of nervous around him but could still be myself, as I didn’t think of him as more than a person who shared my interests and also had a world of other ones that I knew nothing about. I can still remember how I felt in the cab on the way home, struck by having found something that seemed like it would be quite interesting. If anything, he was hopelessly sincere, as I now know that the English have a tendency to be. I was honest, too, and felt so lucky to have found someone who I could talk to, who was interested.

Weeks and several encounters later, he showed up at a club where I was with another group of friends just to tell me that he had realised that I was his muse. He was so excited to share this with me.

We drank, we would fight, we’d lay in bed for hours, hungover and desperate for relief. We threw parties, made art, were rebellious and brave together. We were young and glorious and destined to self-destruct. He dealt with his complicated experience of me in his art. I took his adoration and turned it into power and the courage to be magnificent. Together we were a chemical reaction, bringing out the best and the worst in each other, sometimes exploding and sometimes creating beautiful magic; we were always a sight to be seen and we loved it. Like Sid and Nancy but without the heroin and plus a trust fund and art school federal loans. We both loved the attention, I think for each of us it was a chance to be a part of something envious, to prove that we were just as fabulous as we’d always wanted to be. After one event, when he’d drank too much, he left in a blind rage and disappeared, walking miles through the city at night to finally arrive at dawn at my flat on the south side. He loved me, was in awe of me, and he hated himself as I did. I thought he was wonderful and mean, with his biting English humour that I loved as well. When no one else was listening, he heard me, my comments, my critiques, and rebuttals. We laughed the way that two friends do when they not only find the other funny, but with the joy of finally finding someone else that gets you and your humour.

We did many things together, including my first trip abroad and then my second. The first was just two weeks away to meet his mother who lived in Malta. She was an English socialite who had never worked a day, who’d inherited the fortune of his father on his sudden death. After that we wandered through Rome in the August heat, and then alone I went to Milan for a day. The second time, we left the US for four months in North London after his visa had run out. There we got engaged, we came back, and we fell out some weeks later.

On that fine day May day there were not yet problems but just two young lovers and friends that were happy to have found each other, together in spring, and happy to bask in the warmth of the sun and each other – in the grass, in the wind, and in love – in the love of each other and in ourselves, of finally being seen, being heard, being wanted by someone else who saw the damaged parts and loved them, too. Being kissed for nothing, being admired, being touched by someone else that you would see from a block away and be, every time, excited by their deep, dark blue eyes, looking up at you through a furrowed brow, once downcast and thinking of serious, sad things. Seeing that face look up, change, lighten, transform into one of joy, because of you, this is the highest compliment to receive. It is a look of love, adoration, relief, joy, happiness, admiration, all of these things. But is it selfish on the end of the receiver, as it can often times just serve as a substitute for all of these things coming from within oneself. If I had loved myself, would I have needed him, or even wanted him? Would our bond not have been so immediate, so strong, so entangled? Or would I have seen him simply as someone who needed love, needed me, and still loved him for that, but differently? I think I know now, and knowing now doesn’t change anything but my perception of this time, long, long past. It doesn’t change the perfection of that fine day, of that perfect day, when we loved each other and were loved in return.

Now I can recognise this gaze of love as the way a child looks at their mother or father, and can take this lesson with me as I next see my children, and meet them with all of that love returned to them. I think I missed this so much when I saw my parents as a child, a teen, and then as an adult. My mom would still light up, my dad too, but it was hard for them to express that in actions, beyond that. I think that I was always seeking this in another, that someone would light up upon seeing me, that I could be the center of their world for a minute, that time would temporarily stop in that exchange between us. The experience of being seen, being recognised, being encouraged, I missed out on this so much. Now, I need it less and less, now that I am trying to understand it, and finding it in healthy ways, ways that have no strings, no quid pro quo attached. Now as I sit in the shade of the tree in the garden, the heat surrounding me like a duvet, bugs passing by for a visit, I think again of my dream, preparing the house, the entry on this fine day. I slowly came to realise that it was, in fact, a dream, that no one was coming home, that I would have to leave, to wake up, to go back to the day after a big day, to re-enter all of the things that I’d left behind as they weren’t as important as the preparations. Now all of these things I must go back to, leave this place of simple bliss, of home, of family, of healing, of safety. I must go back; they are not coming. I realise this as I try to pull myself out of sleep, out of fatigue, I attempt to cry out but barely a sound leaves me. I am physically filled with sorrow and sadness, and pain in my heart. One last time, I dip into dreams, again, and grieve for them, again, as a child who has been left alone. I feel lost without them. I want to be young again, to have a party with my family, to be at the center of their loving attention, at my grandmother’s house, in the garden. I see how happy it has made my children, as all day yesterday, even after the guests were gone, they played and read and were just, in a word, content. They felt safe in the warm and loving embrace of god and their ancestors, both present and absent. They understood, through the mere presence of others, that they are part of a community bigger than just the 5 of us, which is, at times, difficult. They are loved by people they do not even know or remember. They are surrounded by stories and changes, of new members of the family that they now realise weren’t always there. They see happy results of sad divorces, of people coming together, for them.

Today I sit in my garden, writing and letting these recent memories heal me, too. I am not a child, left alone. I have my self here now. I am here for my self, a parent to not only my kids but to my inner child, who was left alone before. I can cry out for a past that is gone, and then pull myself back into a fortunate present without the need to erase that memory completely. I only hope that the next time I am there that I can know, deeply, that it is a revisiting – not the present time – so that I can enjoy it with the reverence for a time passed, a past from which I have recovered. I have felt again that pain. I must remember it and then comfort myself and integrate it so that next time, if I do go back, I won’t have to feel it all over again. Perhaps it will be like the memory of all of the perfect days, one great memory of sorrow that I can choose to revisit, a feeling and place that surely will come again, but that until that time, I can keep at a distance, and stay firmly alive and well in the fortunate present.