It's Eid today. We didn’t make a lot of plans, no big family get-togethers, except one that came up too last minute for us to actually go to. I woke up this morning feeling a deep sense of grief, from a dream that came to me during the morning. It featured a visit from Hasan.
He shows up in my dreams not often, but just occasionally enough for me to know that it will happen again. He is often a younger age in each dream, and that age varies. Sometimes he grows up throughout the course of the dream. In today’s, he was small enough for me to hold him and carry him around the house. The house was a mixture of my own and my nani’s – my nani nana’s old apartment has also been coming up in my dreams a lot lately. At present, someone else in our family now lives there, and I have never visited since they had it renovated.
When I see him in my dreams, there is always a sense among us that we all know what has happened, what will happen, and that this is some kind of temporary, dream-like reality. Last night, I asked his baby self if he knows, and he said he did. That turned some cogs in my brain and so I asked, did he always know? Since he was a baby? To this he answered vaguely, and I don’t know what he said. My cousins were around too. I handed him to them so they could hold him too. This isn’t the first time this has happened – dreaming of a gathering of family and cousins where he makes an appearance and we all know that this is special, that this won’t happen again for a long time. From holdable age, he seamlessly transitioned into his pre-teen self. There’s something haunting yet comfortingly all-knowing about his presence as it appears in my dreams, every single time. I also feel a sense of making the most of the time that we have, while I am asleep.
One word that comes to mind is rupture. I feel that reminders of Hasan will always tug at something deep and tender that never goes away. As a family, we have stopped collectively remembering him often, so when I see him in my dreams, it is a reminder that there was a life ‘before’, that we each experienced something that changed everything. I think we don’t talk about it because it is too painful, and we would all cry, and it’s hard to cry in front of people, even family.
I often wonder why we don’t do much together anymore. Much has changed, and much has been ruptured. And of course there have been natural changes; girls have gotten married and started their own families, and everyone else has been on their own respective life paths that have ended up diverging from one another, for whatever reason. It’s not that we don’t see each other, but I don’t think we acknowledge often enough that something broke in 2016.
I can’t not cry as I write this, and I can’t not cry each time I remember. It’s important to remember, isn’t it? So that we can try and make sense of things as they are now? If I don’t do it in my waking life, then my dreams give me a little nudge. It’s all very mystical and yet so very real. But reality is mystical.
So I guess we’re not gathering this Eid the way we did ‘before’. The exact why is important, but maybe it isn’t; I can make sense of it, and I can’t. What I can do is send love to my family, to my khalas and khaloos, chachis and chachas, cousins and grandparents, and acknowledge in my heart if not out loud what we all already know and feel – an Eid remembrance.
<3<3
I think he is reminding you to meet😀giving you a little nudge albeit in your dreams