Last night I had the strangest dream.
For some reason, I’d traveled back to Maine to stay with, of all people, my ex-husband. There were numerous strange moments – when we embraced and I noted his frame was smaller than Skyspook’s (my ex is a few inches shorter), when he confessed he still loved me, when he said that from what he could gather from following me online I seemed happy, if arrogant.
Fair enough.
I suppose the oddest moment was as I was relaying news to him about various people in Ohio (as Ex-Husband lived out here for about 3 months before returning to Maine), and I spoke of a former housemate and a falling out we had with her.
“Really? Can’t say I’m terribly surprised,” Ex-Husband said. “What happened?”
In actuality, outside of the dream, the initial inciting event related to something I wrote.
In the dream, however, the ex-housemate (for the purposes of this essay, we’ll call her Brunhilde) had a commissioned professional photograph of her that came out very attractively. Brunhilde decided she desperately wanted a copy printed that would fit in an ornamented circular frame. She demanded that the printers do that for her. When they told her that the format was incorrect for such a thing but suggested she could order a large print and then trim it to the appropriate shape herself, Brunhilde flew into a rage, and since then, I told Ex-Husband, she’s been utterly psychotic.