first day of fall

And it came in all storm, all yearning. Sturm und drang. I was dreaming about my brother last night. I haven't had any nightmares in a while, at least not that I can remember, but I woke up after the worst of it, fully awake for a minute or so, crashing thunder like a movie.

In my dream we were in Romania, but there were people from here, some of them only aquaintances. We were hiking or something when the guide suddenly decided to go a different way, wouldn't go near this one area. We didn't really know what, but something bad had happened there. And so we all went over to look and I thought it was some sort of cliff edge that people must have gotten too close to, but it turned out it was a well, wider across than you might expect. The top was boarded up and a bunch of people climbed onto it, they were saying look, this isn't dangerous at all, it's fine. There were three of them that I could see, two aquaintances and one I didn't know and he was the one who was stomping around showing how the wood was stable, when suddenly one side of it dropped down (imagine it would revolve around the middle like a coin spins or something, a revolving door) and the two aquaintances dropped straight down, arms in the air and everything. And it took forever to hear them hit the bottom, well over a minute.

Everyone was panicking and then it did it again and I saw my brother had been standing on the well and was hanging on to the edge and I went to grab him but he was yelling, saying he didn't care, and true to how dreams mix up everything, he was saying something about not wanting to do his math homework. But I managed to get him and I was carrying him, so I must have been dreaming about the little boy Josh, not the one I know now.

I woke up then, and when I fell back asleep there was a re-do, and that time I managed to save one of the aquaintances that fell the first time, and Josh wasn't on the well at all. I don't know why but for some reason we couldn't rescue the people who had fallen down the well, there weren't crews or anything, and maybe everyone expected that no one survived the fall but then we found out there were a few who had. When the dream started to get more and more unlike how it started out, I was walking across my apartment complex looking for my staffworker, trying to convince him that someone had to do something, that we had to find rope to lower down the well.

It stormed well into the early morning, as best I can remember. After the first time I woke up, I kept waking up two or three times an hour. I'm thinking now--I'm not normally one to try to figure out what my dreams mean. I go through phases of having crazy vivid dreams (that I remember) every single night, to going long stretches without remembering a thing. I haven't had too many dreams lately, but that one came out of nowhere. If I go to Romania, I'll lose my brother? I don't think it means that. I don't know that it means anything at all except that I miss him, that I haven't been able to talk to him more than once since I've been back in the States. I did think about all that though, a week or two ago. When I leave for mission work, whenever that is, whatever that will look like, I won't be there for them as far as God stuff goes. I can't make that sentence mean what I want it to--I just tried for ten minutes and I can't. I don't know how to say it, and I know that I'm not the only person in their lives who can do so, and not that I even do it well at all. But all I can think about is a conversation I had with an incredible Romanian woman named Ruxi, and it scares me because I'm not as certain as I used to be about my family. I love my brother more than anyone, and I miss him so badly, and this is going back to things I've written about before, things I haven't thought about it a while, but I'm scared for the way things are going for him.

I'm thinking about the accidental double meaning of the word fall in the title of this post, but mostly I'm thinking of my brother. How on the re-do, he wasn't there at all.