The Return of Beloved

I had a dream this morning, sometime around 6 a.m. It came after another one I can’t quite remember — the way dreams sometimes evaporate before our conscious mind can reach them. But this one stayed.

In the dream, I wake up in my house — my bedsitter — but this time, I have a bed. That in itself feels comforting, as if I’ve arrived at a new stage of something. But what catches me off guard isn’t the bed.

It’s her.

There’s a baby, or maybe a toddler, waking up with me. A girl. I’m startled to see her — not scared, just deeply surprised. She’s wearing green rompers, soft and innocent. As she slides off the bed, she tumbles, somersaults slightly, hits her head — but she keeps walking, undisturbed, toward the bathroom, reminding me of myself and how I seem to have skidded, slipped, and tripped all the way to here.

I tell her gently to be careful. I watch her with a strange mixture of awe, fondness, longing, and grief. My Beloved. I know she shouldn’t be here. She belongs to another place — the other side of life. But for a few precious seconds, I’m just grateful. Grateful that she’s here, that she’s grown, that she’s walking.

I feel like Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Watching the ghost of her child return, not as a baby but as a grown woman — a living reminder of what could have been. But unlike Sethe, I don’t want to hold on. I don’t want her stuck here, helping me, haunting me with tenderness. I want her resting. At peace.

I follow her to the bathroom, feeling caught between wonder and reality. I know — logically — this should feel terrifying. A ghost in my house? But it doesn’t. Her presence feels like balm, not dread. Safe. Familiar.

She goes straight for the drainage, and where she disappears, I find all the small things that have been lost. A single sock. Some clothes that vanished without explanation. Things that should have gone in the laundry but slipped through the cracks, quite literally. I realize maybe every time I washed my clothes, dirty water flowed through them. Ruining them. Staining them in ways I didn’t see.

The edges of the bathroom floor aren’t tiled anymore — they’re earthen. Soft and brown. Damp. The water seeps into the soil, and I think to myself, “This is good. The earth will absorb it.” But I also remember: wet soil back home meant snails. They hatched in hidden corners, and once they came, we could never truly get rid of them. That memory of infestation — of something quietly multiplying in the shadows — unsettles me.

Still, I gather the lost items and toss them in the laundry basket. The dream ends there.

When I wake up, I realize something: I’ve never dreamt of her this way. Never as someone whole. Someone walking. Someone real.

Until now, she was always an absence. A soul that never got to live. But this time, she was here. And even though I let her go again, this time it felt… complete. Balanced.

Like Born of Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout, the book I’m reading now, where Sera understands that killing Kolis — the Primal of Death — would mean killing death itself. And in doing so, also disrupting life. Because life and death are two halves of the same truth, eternally bound to each other. You can’t kill death without upsetting life. And maybe, in this dream, I understood that balance too.

She doesn’t belong in my waking world, but I’m thankful she visited. I’m thankful I got to see her walk. I’m thankful she showed me the mess I hadn’t seen — the parts of my life left neglected, grief-soaked and almost rotting from complicated grief, waiting to be noticed.

Because of her and her death, I am finding that other sock that has always felt missing. Because of her loss, I am seeing those snail infestations waiting to bloom. Because of her, I have not only a drainage system to wash away the bad, but also a means of mitigating potential risks.

Gabby, Sometimes healing looks like letting go. But sometimes, it looks like witnessing the impossible, just once, and then watching it disappear into a place where peace finally lives. Sometimes, healing is messy. It means taking one step in the right direction and nine in the other direction. It means trying and failing, then trying again until one day the steps forward outdo the backward steps.

With love.