Christmas is upon us and this year, the holiday spirit has not only been upon me, but what might have beens. I guess returning to Seattle has done this to me; or perhaps it was the first snowflakes I have seen in almost a decade, floating by my window, ever so briefly.
I guess this was all on my mind last night as I had one of those strange dreams. True, it could have been the last minute grilled cheese sandwich or the Benadryl. But once I slipped into slumber, all hell broke loose.
The Janmeister came to me in the dream and told me I was going to be visited by three ghosts. I laughed, of course, thinking wow, how predictable, lifting from Charles Dickens. But it was Goethe who said, “Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.” And who am I to argue with Johann?
I continued to dream about large women (yes, Princess Bride joke) when the first spirit came to me. It was Heather, the Ghost of Marriages Past #1.
She spirited me to another time, one in which we had survived that dreadful New Year’s Eve party at the Bunkhouse tavern with my brothers and sisters-in-laws and actually continued to be married to one another to this day.
My life was so different. I was living in West Seattle in an apartment. I still worked in the mailroom, but at least had risen to the position of Lead. I stopped working at Associated Grocers when they closed down and went to work for a string of other mailrooms throughout the city. There was a knock on the door and my brothers and sisters-in-law had stopped by. I had just seen them the day before at the Seafair Pirate party and we had arranged to have a little Second City Slicker band practice before heading out to the local bars for beer and novelty songs. It was a life, not a wonderful life, but a life nonetheless.
Later that night, a second ghost visited me. Yes, the Ghost of Marriages Past #2. She showed me what life would have been like, had we stayed together. She never would have gotten her master’s degree in business. She and I would still be working at CommuniCreations in Port Orchard, struggling to make ends meet. She’d have never taken a position at Boeing, let alone ending up in Virginia doing super cool secret project work. We would have ended up with another kid, largely due to that extra bottle of wine we had shared one night while solving the world’s problems. We would still be very big fish in a very small pond, playing pirate, enjoying our friends, and generally living a quiet, predictable life in the ‘burbs. She would have never been able to reach her full potential, nor me mine. I would have simply suffocated the both of us with my fears of change and reluctance to take risks. And she would become increasingly bitter about it; still we’d have had a relatively good existence.
Well, this was all very telling and extremely stressful. By now I was in a full sweat from head to toe, not because of any regret about the pasts I had been shown to date, but the one that I knew was coming next.
I knew she was coming. The room was dark and foreboding. The temperature dipped to icy cold. I felt extreme anxiety and even a touch of gloom. She showed me the life I could have had in Florida, if we had stayed together. I was taken to the house on Fair Point Lane and there we were, living out life. I had stopped imbibing in wine, I had long ago forgotten about being a writer, taking a job at the local Walmart as a greeter. She had gone back to her radio career, filing reports around the world, her three Peabodies stacked on a shelf where my office desk used to be. We were still performing as pirates, but she had taken over the crew; me relegated to being a wallflower, my personality sucked from my being. The one time I had been called Mr. Murillo was now a common occurrence. Because she was making the lion’s share of the money, I had become something of a nothing, lost in the shadow of her opulence and magnificence. I had even contemplated suicide, planning to lock myself into one of Walmart’s upright freezers, becoming frozen food for thought for thousands of other browbeaten, pussy-whipped men in America.
“Why are you showing me this, Ex-Whatever #3? Why are you reminding me of what my future would have been like with you?”
She looked at me without emotion.
I thought, “Oh my God!! This isn’t a dream! This is actually my life!”
I wasn’t asleep, but awake, and the last three years of bliss with the Janmeister had been the dream. We had never really gotten together. I had somehow made the relationship with the ex work and we were still together.
I let out a blood-curdling scream that ricocheted through the ages. It reverberated in the catacombs those who long passed before us. It could be heard throughout the universe, a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were silenced (thanks Obi-Wan).
And then I awoke. In the darkness I struggled to focus on my surroundings. Was I still looking at Egyptian decor or the blank walls of a rental? I felt the bed, trying to figure out where I was. Finally, I found someone next to me.
Whew! She was warm, not ice cold. It was the Janmeister after all. It had all been a dream, an Ebenezer Scrooge level nightmare that showed me clearly what might have been, and thankfully, was not.
No, you won’t find me reflecting nostalgically on what might have beens this holiday season. I’m good with the here and now, knowing that I never stood a ghost of a chance with any of them.
In the Emerald City, afraid to go back to sleep,
– Robb