A Wonderful Kind of Messed Up

It’s hell season in grad school once more, and just when I think I’ve gotten the hang of it, the extreme sleep deprivation starts to mess with my head.

 

I’ve been doing this to myself lately. It’s been fun.

 

Take yesterday, for instance. I don’t know how I managed to lose my way as I was walking home from the uni. But I did – and in broad daylight at that, pfft. Instead of turning left on the street where my house is, I turned left on the street before it and groggily walked all the way to where my house would’ve been if I were on the right street. Then I looked at the strange Queenslander* which was there and went,

Hmm, that’s odd. Where did my house go?

I stared at the house for about thirty seconds and took a good look at the other houses in the area before it finally dawned on me that I took a wrong turn.

Ha! That was funny. And stupid. In equal measure.

But what really got me convinced that I’m losing it, though, was waking up this morning to vivid snippets of a dream I had about my very own wedding. I saw the face of my groom and those of my parents and closest gut friends. It was big and festive but informal. My wedding gown didn’t have a trail, and he looked dapper in a barong Tagalog. There was no photo booth and wedding souvenirs, but we served red wine and steak to all our guests. My mother’s face was radiant. I remember mentioning in my thank-you speech that ours was a whirlwind romance, but I said yes because I feel like I’ve known him for a very long time.

It was that vivid, that real.

Daydreaming is best done under a red pine tree. It just looks better.

Now that freaks me out big time because I don’t remember ever dreaming about my wedding – unconsciously or otherwise. I dream about taking long and lazy train rides and getting a PhD and teaching in Africa for a year. I dream of watching the northern lights dance before my very eyes and getting fit enough to run a full marathon one day and yes, even finding true love. But weddings? Never.

Which is not to say I’ve written off all possibility of ever getting married. I hope to, but thinking about it just doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve been told that’s uncharacteristic for a woman, but it’s really just the wedding bit I don’t daydream about. When I think of finding love, I imagine enjoying insightful conversations about the mundane and the profound over coffee. And exchanging private jokes on long and tiring road trips. And watching fireworks and sunsets and fireflies in comfortable silence.

So you see, it’s really just the wedding. Perhaps it’s my fear of commitment that has rendered me incapable of dreaming about getting married. I automatically equate weddings with forever, which I then automatically imagine as a painfully long time to promise to someone, more so if he turns out to be the wrong one.

Until now, that is.

So maybe something has changed? And I am about to break free? And I am on the verge of believing that weddings are grand and glorious and all that?

Of course, it could also just be the result of pulling too many all-nighters in a span of three weeks. So perhaps I should skip sleep some more then? I think it would be wonderful to get used to this wedding-dreaming, messed-up version of me. :))

—-

*a type of architecture usually found in Queensland and parts of New South Wales, Australia