A one-sided conversation

I had a little nap before but only managed maybe ten minutes. I often take an afternoon/ evening kip as I tend to only get 4-5 hours sleep during the night as it is the main time I have a chance to write for Steem in peace. 10 minutes isn't quite enough but it was interrupted by a strange little dream, of my father.

I haven't seen my dad since 2011 when he visited Finland for his 75th birthday and I haven't spoken to him for a long time either. He suffers dementia and it is too hard to catch him at a good time. From what I hear, @galenkp shows him some videos of @smallsteps and it makes him happy, even if he doesn't always realize who it is.

In the dream we were in a car with him driving and we cruised around the town I grew up in and just talked. I moved from there when I was 15 which s almost 25 years ago but, it is still the place I would say is home, if any place really is these days. He was never much of a listener and it was much the same in the dream but, it was comforting to have him there as I told him about how tired I have been lately but, I am working toward something more.

As is typical for parents, he always believed there was something more in me than I ever saw in myself but he and I rarely spoke of such things. In many ways, we rarely spoke at all as by the time I was old enough to have decent conversations, my family was largely scattered to the winds, he and I included. When we did speak, it was more about the world and life at large than anything particularly personal other than my illness, which consumed so much of my life at those times. Even those conversations were never at a practical level.

It is funny that in dreams we can see those we haven't seen, illusions made by our memory of them, our expectations and assumptions about the way we think they would look and behave. The reality is that there is no bridge between us, it is my mind generating responses and while my father appears there, it is my words that flow through him.

In some way it is a feedback loop as so much of who we are is dictated by our parents and then we go on to dictate similar to our own children, echoing the words of our past into the future. The conversation in the dream is me speaking what I believed he would speak and imagining him act the way I believed he would act and the illusion is built from my experience as I knew him, not as he is now, and even that is a filtered experience colored by opinion and bias.

I am under no illusions about this future though and unless something drastic happens financially for the better, I am not going to ever see him again and it is unlikely that I will ever have a conversation with him again, at least not one of any consequence. I am okay with it, I am at peace and for him, I don't think he anymore cares or knows any other way.

For him, I am likely just a ghost of memory he can rarely access - and for me, I can only speak to him through my dreams, tricks of the mind, a one-sided conversation. In the dream he was still a good man, despite not being much of a listener.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

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