I dreamed last night that water was streaming through the ceilings of my apartment.
(When I was a little girl, I lived in an old farm house which had been converted into a duplex and probably should have been condemned , oh, 20 years go. Water came through the ceilings there sometimes. And squirrels.)
In my dream, I panicked and ran upstairs to yell at my stupid hippie neighbors for running so much water. But when I got up there, all I found was Joseph Gordon Levitt living in a palatial apartment. He apologized profusely for the water damage and told me that since his girlfriend had just died that I should just move into his much nicer place.
My landlady came over to discuss the much nicer apartment with me and said that I had to accept a special deal in order to live there. As long as this place was my home, I had to clean up after everyone in the building.
As long as I agreed to clean up other people’s messes, I could have a beautiful life. And as soon as I stopped cleaning, it was back down to the waterlogged one-bedroom for me.
At the very painful end of a relationship that I thought was going to last the rest of my life (I’m 0 for 2, you guys), I can only shake my head at the heavy-handed metaphor my sad little brain dreamed up for me. I’m tired of other people’s messes. I’m going to do what I have to do to start tending to my own.