Memoir

I didn't take this picture. I found it of Paul on the internet and saved it to my desktop. According to my site stats since Paul died, forty-one people have searched for his name on the internet and have ended up on my blog. Even when he is no longer here, he is so very loved by everyone.

What I really wanted to blog about is not the traffic on the internet, but the fact that Paul appeared to me in my dream this morning! This happens often with my grandmother. Since she died three years ago she constantly talks to me through my dreams, always unexpectedly. I take it as a sign that we were so close in life that we talk now even in death.

My grandmother is usually the only one who comes to visit, although she does sometimes bring up the fact that she is there with Sean's mom and sometimes she tells me to tell Sean the weirdest messages... like one time she asked me to tell him that his mom said that she was sorry for missing all of his games. When I asked Sean about it, he said that when she was dying she no longer could go to his sports games and she felt badly about it.

Chills.

I don't know what I believe in, if there is a heaven or a hell or a God or Allah or reincarnation or pure disintegrating back into the earth. I really don't know how I feel about life after death. Maybe seeing my loved ones in my dreams is how I cope. But these dreams are so real to me when they happen and I like to think that they are not simply my subliminal mind missing my loved ones.

This morning in my dream, Paul and I simply had a conversation. We talked freely about how it feels to know that you are dying -- as we talked freely when he was still alive -- and I asked him if I could write him a poem or a letter telling him how mad I was that I was losing such a close friend to cancer.

He hugged me and said "Yeah girl!" as he would. I don't remember much about the dream which is odd for me because I usually remember every detail. But I remember how it felt to hug him once more and to hear his voice in all of his wonderful glory.

My spirits are so very high this morning, because I just had a visit from one of my favorite people in the whole world. Makes me sure that we wont lose touch, even though we are separated by life and death.

Funny that I'm more embarrased at the state of our backyard than of the idea that I am making a complete fool of myself in front of the whole internet.

I'm going to find myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means
And we'll fill in the missing colors
In each other's paint-by-number dreams
And then we'll put our dark glasses on
And we'll make love until our strength is gone
And when the morning light comes streaming in
We'll get up and do it again
Get it up again

I love bumper stickers. I think they are fantastic. Nothing better than having to stop for another stupid red light and having something to read on the car in front of you.

I'm not good at describing myself in one quote. In fact, I struggled for weeks to find the perfect quote to put under my high school photo in the yearbook and decided that nothing I picked could describe me just right. So I picked nothing. No quote.

Nearly ten years later, I've thought of a quote, but it took me this long.

My quote, my mantra, was written by Kahlil Gibran and is this:

"And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."

In college, I bought my first car and immediately covered it with bumper stickers. I was sooo happy to be able to make my car stand out in a crowd and to express myself through slogans... that was, until I started working at a place where my coworkers were a bunch of 50-year-old gossipers who would report to each other whenever they saw my car in public.

"Ooooh, Lauren slept in Hilltop dorms last night!" or "Hey, I didn't see your car in the lot, where were you?"

After a while, I wished only to blend in, I grew tired of those same bumper stickers even though I enjoyed looking at the expressions of my tailgaters in the rearview mirror at red lights.

Now, I don't have a single bumper sticker on my car. I still enjoy reading bumper stickers, but they seem to be going out of style. Maybe because nowadays people don't want to be bothered. Plus, they're such a pain to scrape off when it's time to sell the car.

What have your bumper stickers said?