"Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed." - Carrie, in "Four Weddings and a Funeral"

I had a dream that H got remarried.
(H: “Why on EARTH would I do that?”)
I screamed at him and threw things and pitched a real fit but he was implacable – just like in real life.
I kept waiting for him to tell me he wouldn’t get married again, after all, but that never happened. (Even though we weren’t even separated, let alone divorced, in my dream - or in real life, either. In fact, tomorrow is our twelfth wedding anniversary. Ah, love. And stubbornness. Mostly stubbornness.)

This woman he married? She looked sorta like me, but shorter and thinner and with long, cascading dark hair. Conventionally pretty and feminine. Think Lorelai on Gilmore Girls, but more petite, maybe not as toothy.
(H: “Ok, I guess I can see that.”)

She had a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old daughter, pretty in a well-scrubbed sort of way, a little heavier than her mom, the type of teenager who wears patchouli and peasant skirts from import shops and Birkenstocks.

The new wife has dogs – maybe five, or six. Beagle-y types, with names like Charlie and Butch.
(H: “Now that’s REALLY crazy.” H doesn’t care for dogs.)

She lived in a weird little house with cement floors, and a two-lane highway running through the middle of the house, requiring you to look both ways before crossing the hall to use the bathroom. I was worried about what the boys would do in the middle of the night.

My mother-in-law-but-not-my-mother-in-law (in that odd way of dreams) was there, waiting with me for H to come home. She thought she should be there when I saw the happy couple together for the first time.
(H: “Why didn’t you go to the wedding?”
Me: “I don’t think I was invited, but I wouldn’t have gone anyway.”
H: “Really? Why not?”
Me: Silent, but give him a withering look of utter disdain, accurately conveying my feelings of how-stupid-are-you?)

H came in the door after the nuptials, wearing a surprisingly casual short-sleeved yellow plaid shirt.
(H: “Well, second wedding and all. Don’t want to overdo it.”)

And the New Wife said, “My husband!” and they embraced and kissed theatrically, her hair in a long swoop over H’s arm and down her back.

He SAID it wouldn’t change anything and I was relieved, but then I realized that he would be LIVING with her everyday, and not with me. I had that feeling I got my freshman year in college when the boy who’d just broken my heart told me he still loved me - but he was dating short, fat, chipmunky Jan Mullet.

New Wife was (H: “Obviously!”) going to be the boys’ stepmom, which would have been ok, I suppose, if I were DEAD.

“I thought you said you didn’t want to be married, to anyone,” I said to him.
He replied, “I have a lonely place, I deserve to have it filled.”
(H snorted. To be fair, so did I, upon recounting this bit of maudlin treacle.)

***************

My dream last night was even stranger, involving a beloved ex-boyfriend’s wedding, and superhero villains, and this gigantic old house I lived in with my gazillion siblings and my dad (I don’t have a gazillion siblings, and my dad’s been dead for almost twenty years).
I can’t even begin to recall what I had for dinner, or if perhaps I didn’t eat enough, or...does anyone know if one of the side effects of amoxicillin is fevered dreams?

Or maybe I should quit smoking so much opium?