Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Love in the Third Degree.
Something is of off kilter and I can’t quite place it. It’s a gorgeous spring weekend and I have tons of stuff to accomplish, with every intention of planting a few flowers and cutting back some old bushes, too, both in the literal and metaphorical sense. I’m also doing some serious editing this weekend while a virtual assistant is finishing another project for me. So full speed ahead and I’ve been feeling so…on kilter for the past week.
I also had a great opportunity to meet some people last night—completely new to me, possibly part of a new community—but by the time I got home and knew how much I wanted to accomplish in a different area that seemed more pressing, for some reason it didn’t feel right for me to attend this event last night. Something with the timing. The one next month will be more suitable to what I’m looking for, true, but for some reason I wasn’t to be out and about last night.
Not even to the grocery store or to a movie.
I worked for a few hours in the early evening—fun stuff—then talked to some friends, and felt walloped enough to nap before continuing my work. I decided to meditate instead and picked up some really strange things. Whomever I was connecting with was in a social setting with some odd things going on that certainly weren’t from my own experiences. Definitely not the group I would have been socializing with last night if I’d gone, either. What I was picking up in my meditation was a fun place but a little bit of a forced feeling in the having fun department.
But from there, I fell asleep and began to dream and never got back up. It was somewhere in the dreams that I began to feel off kilter. Long story short, there was a man in my dreams who was somehow in the form of this boy I vaguely knew in college, a roomie’s boyfriend’s fraternity Little Brother. Cute boy I knew by name only because of mutual friends. We never had anything to do with each other and neither of us had an interest in the other in college. The only time I’ve thought about him since college was because someone used a name similar to his, which was very unusual. But in the dream, he was in the present and began to pursue me romantically.
At first, I didn’t take him seriously but he was persistent, youthful, joyful. I finally opened up to him and the relationship became more intimate, emotionally, and was approaching becoming more intimate physically. At the last possibly minute, he chickened out. Not the best term to use, but he literally got scared and could go no further into the relationship.
I was hurt and angry—on many levels, but especially because he had pursued me when I never would have thought of pursuing him. But, because he was so scared, I assured him everything was okay. We were apparently on some kind of trip together so we had a few bags to pack and I got started right away on re-packing mine.
Only…when I started putting my clothes in my suitcase on the floor, there were fire ants in them, both inside and outside the suitcase. I didn’t notice until they were in the suitcase but I didn’t get stung. But the suitcase was full of ants in my clothes. I considered dumping the suitcase and putting the garments back in individually but there were too many ants. When I left, I ended up leaving my baggage behind so it wouldn’t sting me. I have no idea what happened to the guy, if he stayed, or if he was bitten. Our parting words were, well, we can try this again later.
But I felt horrible in the dream and pulled myself out of it. I didn’t get back up to work. Instead, I went back into dreaming, looking for something to right the off kilter feeling. Eventually some dreams of other friends in the present helped, especially where we were building new things.
But in spite of the beautiful day outside and exciting work to do, there’s something that’s amiss right now and I’m still dealing with that OFF kilter feel. It’s as if somewhere out there, something happened last night, and there is still an echo from it into today
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