Grace ponders human mortality.

This dream is from about a week ago, before I had my hernia surgery. That may or may not have had something to do with the subject matter.

I was standing in a hospital hallway with my younger sister who was somehow also my twin. (And was also an accident, according to my mom.) She looked like a rather skeletal Mayim Bialik. We had just been brought to the hospital because we were both getting faint and having dizzy spells, and we had just found out that we both had a life-threatening pulmonary condition. I left the hospital with the strong sense that one of us was inevitably going to die.

We were at an indoor public pool later in the week when my sister suddenly collapsed. I caught her body and tried to stand her back up or support her but it looked like her head was lolling so far back that I couldn't see it. I shifted her around, trying to find her head so I could see her face, until I suddenly realized that her was no longer attached to her body. I looked around for her head while still clinging onto her body, and finally spotted it at the very bottom of the pool next to us. It was leaking a growing cloud of bright red blood into the pool water.

I started yelling for people to help us, astonished that they hadn't notice the decapitation taking place right next to them. At first no one heard me, and when someone finally did, they didn't take me seriously and just kind of casually walked over before finally realizing it was an emergency situation. It was obviously too late for my sister, her headless body was already dead in my arms, and there was nothing I or any of the others could do to save her.

It turns out she died because she had sex directly after eating. (We had weirdly specific physical and dietary restrictions due to our heart condition.) She was like thirteen years old and I'm a nineteen year-old virgin so I kind of said a little "thank you" to the gods and I'm pretty sure my mother did too because she was upset but not SUPER upset that the twin had died because as she told me very bluntly, my sister had been an accident and I had much more promise anyway. We took her body but left her head, hidden in the cloud of blood, at the bottom of the pool for someone else to retrieve and clean up because that would be too disturbing for us to do.

Later on I'm in a band or orchestra class, in a flute section with Jake and Irene. (The picture is an old photo and Irene and I at a real orchestra rehearsal.) At every rehearsal they would give each other a look, then get up to "go to the bathroom" at intervals so they could hang out in the hallway. I would occasionally participate, but on this instance I really had to use the bathroom (and it was either the same day or the day after my sister died so I kind of got a free pass) and I asked after Jake and Irene had both left, and the teacher said I could go but I had to text someone from the bathroom so she knew I was okay because she was afraid I'd be upset and suicidal.

On the way there I ran into the other two flutists and we strolled down the hallway a little ways, chatting and laughing which made me feel better. We passed Jake's locker which had a sign I had made for him with his name and big hemp glasses frames on the door, and next to it was his friend who had committed suicide's locker, which had lots of pictures and letters taped to it in his memory, and it made me awkward and quiet for a moment as we passed it. I woke up shortly after arriving in what I'm pretty sure was the girl's bathroom from my old middle school.

The weird thing is that my old flute buddy Jake died earlier this year, in March. It took me a while after waking up to remember that it wasn't a friend of his who had killed himself. I really enjoyed seeing him again, even if it was in a dream. He was a good guy.