Mezzanine

I don't remember much, but I needed to write this down. I think I'm in an old folks home. Everyone around me is older, like grey hair and wrinkles and what not. Except it's like a school cafeteria with all these tables lined up and people sitting at them. I remember my friend Kim is there (she just had to put her dog to sleep yesterday) and everyone is giving her pairs of jeans. There are like 30 pairs of jeans scattered on the end of one of the tables. They are all waist size 32, but the lengths are all different. I picked up one of the pairs and told Kim "I don't think anyone knows how tall you are!"

Then, I guess I was a resident there, but now I'm getting kicked out. There is a box of my stuff, a couple of baseball hats and visors, and a ton of jewelry. I told the guy that gave me my box, "Oh you couldn't let me pack up my own things, you just decided to do it for me?!" I was angry. So I was transferring my things from one box to a different one (to organize?) and a couple of ladies come up to me and start going through the jewelry and taking it! I had to fight them to get it back, not like punching them, but I had to grab like a pearl earring out of some lady's hand and she was all "No, that's MY earring!" And I was like, "NO, that used to be my grandmother's!!!" And I was so livid that someone wanted to take my grandmother's things from me!

Then I think I'm still in the cafeteria, but I'm looking in a chest of drawers. I opened one of the drawers and now I can see inside the chest of drawers. Inside there are places where someone had fastened into the frame yarn or that floss stuff that you use to make friendship bracelets, and strung it through holes in the side. (This reminds me of when my sister was young and she taught my how to make friendship bracelets by using a clipboard to hold the end of the bracelet as you start knotting it.)

Now I don't know where I am, the background is a little blurry, but my sister is there and so is my grandmother (my mom's mom). There's a song on the radio and I don't have any idea what it is, never heard it before, probably some song that doesn't exist anywhere outside of my head, and my grandmother is singing along to it. My grandmother had passed away a long time ago, and the only time I ever heard her even hum was when we were staying at her house in Chicago and she had the radio in the kitchen on in the mornings. I don't think she ever sang. So when I work up, I was practically crying. I don't know what made me so emotional. Maybe I wish we were closer? I was too young to appreciate her company before she got dementia. My sister got all the benefit of really knowing her. Maybe that's how life is funny... I wind up with a really nice job and married, with no obvious mental issues, and my sister is a mental case who can't keep a job, on disability, and not married with no kids... but she got to be really close to my grandma, something that I wish I had.