What might have been…

My eyes shot open in the middle of the night. I sat there paralyzed for a moment, or an hour. I am not sure which. And then suddenly and uncontrollably I started to cry.

As my sleeping mind slowly reconcilled with my waking mind, I realized that I had just had the most frightening dream I have ever had in my life. But what was scary about it wasn’t the monsters or the fires or all of the crazy things that find their way into your dreams.

What was so scary about it was that it was almost as though I had seen my life play out in an alternate course. It was real. It was reality. It was possible. It wasn’t so much a look to the future as it was a look at the past and what might have been.

The dream shook me and rocked me in a way that I have never felt before. Soon my crying turned to sobbing and my breathing turned into a panicked fight to get air into my body.

My frightened state woke Chewie up, who’s first reaction was to call 911. He didn’t know if I was having a heart attack or a panic attack, or what. Once I was able to calm down enough to the point where I could get a word or two in between each sob, I told Chewie about my dream:

In the dream he and I were living in a run down apartment in Minneapolis. It was dark and dirty and overrun with shadows. We were in our apartment going about our business when there was a knock at the door. When I opened the door, I immediately recognized the person as one of my ex’s "partners in crime." Immediately a fear rushed through my body when I saw him. Because I knew when I saw him, my ex was soon to follow. And I knew that if I saw him, it was because my ex had sent him.

Before he even spoke I was divising a plan to escape in my mind. I had known that I had successfully avoided my ex and eluded his crew for 2 or 3 years now. And now, he had found me again.

(In real life, my ex had someone follow me from my work to my new apartment when I moved a couple years ago to get away from him. I always had a hunch that it was this friend that he had follow me. And now here he was in my dream).

All he said when I opened the door was that my ex was looking for me, and I better stay put. He then turned and walked away.

I closed the door and tried to express to Chewie that we needed to leave immediately. He didn’t understand, and we didn’t have the time to discuss why we needed to leave. He was frustrated but I told him to trust me, and I would explain later. We gathered a few necessities like our cell phones and some money and left.

We crept through the halls of the apartment building. I saw a number of plain-clothes police officers enter the building. I was relieved as I thought somehow someone had gotten wind of the danger we were in and called for help. But in my mind, I knew that didn’t make sense since there was no yelling, no reason for anyone to know our danger but us.

We learned the police were there on a domestic disturbance call for people that lived below us. But able to get the attention of one of the officers, I began to explain to her that we were in danger and that I was fearing for our lives. Before I had a chance to explain everything, the front door to the apartment complex opened and someone walked in. The officer was able to look over the edge and see who entered. By the time I got there, the person had disappeared in the stairway. By the look on the officer’s face, I knew it was him.

He was there to kill us. He was there to kill us because after sending his accomplice, he learned that I had moved on and was now living with another man. And that’s what put him over the edge. He was going to kill me and he was going to kill Chewie.

I turned back around to look at the stairway onto the second floor. And out of the shadows walked my ex. Standing across from us, he looked right at me. He had the scarriest look on his face. It was empty, vacant, and angry.

My ex, the officer and I stood paralyzed.

My ex said "I just had to know."

And as he said this, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun and pointed it right at me.

And I remember fearing for Chewie that he was going to die because of something from my past. I remembered feeling horribly guilty. I thought about Isaiah and how he wouldn’t have a dad. I thought about the police officer who walked into the middle of the situation without all of the information to act appropriately and how she was going to die and her family would be without their mother. Then I remembered thinking about my family and how they would hear of my brutal death without knowing that this man was my ex and that he used to brutally attack and rape me. They still to this day don’t know about that relationship.

I heard him pull the trigger back and I woke up.

Even as I write this I am overcome with emotion. It feels so real. So possible. It feels like what actually might have happened if….

I literally feel like I lost my life in that dream. I feel like two others also lost their loves because of my past. I was overcome with a guilt and a shame I couldn’t, and still am having a hard time, shaking.

It was about 3:15 when I woke up that day. And needless to say I never went back to sleep. I am grateful Chewie was there to listen and comfort me. I’m grateful things didn’t turn out that way. But I felt as though I had some vision of the future, some psychic vision…only it was from the past. Or maybe it wasn’t.

But for now it’s what might have been.