The hanging

I had an “It’s a Wonderful Life” sort of experience last night.  Not in the heartwarming, family, Christmassy sense, but rather more like a man hanging over a bridge asking if life wouldn’t be better if he had never been born.

For the last week or so, since returning from Tamaland, I’ve gone through a lifetime’s worth of all sorts of nasty, quease-inducing carnival rides of emotions.  Part of me just felt immensely sad at saying goodbye to a country I thought I’d married for life.  Part of me was angry, no, furious, at the rampant, unhindered oppression of the women there, as well as at the people who, through condemnation, judgment, hypocrisy and apathy, have helped me get to this place of despair where I now live.  But most of all, I felt guilty.  Guilty that I saved myself out of abuse because in doing so I had to abandon the girls and women I love so much, to their own lives of abuse.  Guilty because I got out, and they never can.  The cognitive dissonance of my own salvation vs. theirs has been ripping me apart.  I love them, yet I left them.  I would die for them, but now I must live without them.  The myriad contradictions warring against my brain, the result being that I’ve been wishing I were dead, with all my heart, since I left that land. 

Then, last night, I dreamed that I was sentenced to hanging for hitting a man who had touched me inappropriately (obviously my mind’s still in Tamaland).  At my sentencing, I was given a choice of whether or not I wanted to die.  Interestingly, the man I had accused was also sentenced to die, and I went on my knees and kissed the hand of the judge and begged in order to get that man a reprieve.  But I myself asked to die.

The dream felt crazy realistic to me, especially in the passage of time.  The days after the incident.  The days to the sentencing.  Then, after the sentencing, I went home, prepared for my death, went to bed and set my alarm for 7 a.m. (the actual time I woke up).

As the early morning hours (in the dream) ticked by, I came to a moment of crisis in which I realized that I had made my decision too hastily.  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to die.  But there was no turning back now.  The people were already setting up the scaffold, my anxious and grieving family had turned up, and there was no last minute telegram, no benevolent leader making any decisions about a reprieve.  I could almost feel the rope around my neck, myself swinging from the beam, the choking sensation and then the nothingness.  As I steeled myself to die, I prayed, “God, I know only a miracle can save me now.  If you have any reason left for me to live, please make that miracle happen.” 

And then I woke up.

The wonder at waking up equaled anything felt in Inception.  Years and lifetimes had gone by in that dream.  I almost didn’t recognize my reality; it took a full 15 minutes for me to realize that I really wasn’t going to die.  And even stranger, something truly had changed in me.  It was a rare privilege granted to me, that I got to pose a deep question to myself, and play out the answer to see what I really believed, without any real consequence.  

I guess I’m not ready to die.  Not yet.