Sometimes my dreams seem normal, up until they go wrong. That is, sometimes they don’t actually feature my parents or the abuse.

Sometimes they just feature the two people who betrayed me to my parents while I was in hiding from them after the death threats.

I am not Christian, and it makes me sad that when I think of the word I remember more their reborn-again zealousy, rather than the quiet and decent Christian students who helped shelter me, and which led to the sad conclusion of a somewhat enjoyable if stress-laden life. But these words are fitting, even if they don’t show up in any Bible (though they are commonly attributed as being so): Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.

I am reminded of all this sadness because of the weekend, partly, and because of the nightmare I just woke up from. It was where one of them had put out a large newspaper ad in a college newspaper trying to guilt me back to my parents. They never put out an ad in real life, but at least part of these words were real things they said to me over a phone conversation, after they told me they’d been passing information about my movements to my parents all this time, and now my parents were coming to get me (again).

(Trust me, my PTSD isn’t normally as exciting as this.)

Anyways, their words had all the emotional and life-experience depth, now that I think about it, of a 12-year old. Which is actually quite insulting to some 12-year olds I’ve known. Here are some phrases I remember from the dream, and thank gods I don’t remember more:

Starvation? I don’t think so. Sounds more like self-induced anorexia to me.

Liar lies. If you really were abused that badly, why aren’t you on talk-show circuits about it? Since you haven’t taken that measure, obviously you’re lying about your so-called abuse.

Parents do not abuse children. You’re just looking for attention.

GO BACK TO YOUR PARENTS!

There are so many things wrong here that I don’t even know where to begin. Indeed, there were so many things wrong with them….

That was indeed when I lost everything but what I could fit into a backpack, small duffle, and a suitcase. And that is ultimately why I roll my eyes when someone claims that physical books are guaranteed to be around. Or physical anything, really. You can’t back up objects over three different secure datastores, or at least, not today.

Or maybe physical = forever really is true for everyone else except me, and my life and I are just pathetic.

I know that’s not true, but it takes some amount of diplomacy from my brain to my heart sometimes to convince myself that such things are not true. And right now my brain is still unsure of itself.

I’m going back to bed now.

P.S. I really felt for poor Lord Peter in Whose Body? towards the end, when he was hearing and seeing things from WW I again. And it was really portrayed nicely, because he didn’t suddenly become better after the flashback stopped, and was really out of sorts through the end of the book.