I never write, I never call

Dear Tim;

It’s been a while since I wrote, I know, I know. But I had a weird dream about you the night before last. Like, a really weird dream. And my dreams are usually odd!

First, though, I’ve been thinking about you and your cooking for like a month now – it’s going to be time to buy a new stove/oven/range soon (Q: why are there three words for the same thing? I never know what to call it!) (A: the KitchenAid website tells me that “The difference between a range, stove and oven depends on who you ask. However, if you’re shopping for appliances, brands often use these terms: an oven is an enclosed cavity for baking, a stovetop or cooktop is an open, flat surface you cook on, and a range or stove is the standalone appliance with both.”).

I looked for a couple of days at Lowes, Home Depot, Best Buy, reading reviews, and what it boils down to is that I don’t want to fucking buy a new range. Cooking large was your thing, not mine. I only cook for me so why do I need something big and fancy – and it looks like EVERYTHING is big and fancy. I swear I’m about ready to go to some sketchy Goodwill type of place and buy a one-burner avocado green stove from 1972.

And then I remember how happy you were to buy that new range when we moved in here, and what a fucking piece of shit it was from Day One, and how I was so annoyed at you then bringing our old range from the Gainesville house and keeping it in the garage taking up space, until about three or four years in to living here when the super big amazing range you loved so much but had been such a fucking pain in the ass, up and quit working and nothing could bring it back. And then you put the NEW range in the garage and moved the OLD range, with only three working burners, and the glitchy timer button, into the kitchen, and I’ve been using it now since then.

I don’t need a range that you can put frozen food into and set some sort of Alexa timer that will defrost/preheat/cook/keep warm. I work at home. I’m never more than about 500 feet away from the kitchen (unless I’m in Gainesville running errands, and in that case I’m probably eating in town). I don’t need a range that’s also a convection oven, air fryer, and whatever the fuck else. I already have that scary air fryer/toaster thing I bought while you were in the hospital, that I bought because you’d wanted one. Then you never got home to use it. You’re never going to get to use whatever kind of range I buy, so why should I buy something extravagant? I mean, yes, I’m worth something extravagant, but I don’t WANT it. I just want to be able to cook bacon, fry burgers, bake my cheesy potato dish, and broil the occasional steak.

Anyway.

This dream I had about you night before last.

I dreamed that you hadn’t died. That for some reason, you had died while we were on a cruise (upcoming vacation anxiety?) and even though I had seen your body (like I did in real life) because I had been in the room on the cruise when you died (like I was in the hospital room in real life, when you died), you and one other person who had also died on the cruise, showed up at… wherever I was. Was I at home? Kind of, but it wasn’t the home we lived in, the one I live in now, although it was in the dream. In the dream it was a house we owned together and you showed up on the day I was moving out of it. You were mad. You were mad that I hadn’t waited for you to come back, and I was mad at you because I had thought you were fucking dead! You told me you hadn’t really died, no matter what I saw – that you and this other person had fallen off the ship and drifted off on an iceberg (upcoming Titanic/White Star/Cunard trip anxiety?) and drifted off, and it had taken you two years to come home.

To which I was like, what, were you on the iceberg for TWO YEARS???? You couldn’t, at any point in your journey home, have PICKED UP A PHONE TO CALL ME AND TELL ME YOU WERE OK? So we were kind of in an angry stand-off with you mad at me for moving on with my life and me mad at you for not being responsible enough to even let me know you were alive. And then you kind of sheepishly admitted that it was stupid you hadn’t called me, that you had wanted to surprise me and make me happy, and that you thought it would be a lovely surprise when you came home and you had no idea I would have ever moved on. But you were home now, so couldn’t I get over it, and undo all the changes I’d made in my life in the last two years?

You know, I’ve gotten mad at friends before for shit they did in my dreams, but none of them were also DEAD. And none of them ever pulled anything in my dreams that was something I could actually see them doing in real life. This? I could see you doing. Which honestly is kind of hilarious, in a super dark/funny way. I could absolutely see it never occurring to you that you would need to call me; after all,  you were trying to get home to me. I should have known that, in your eyes.

PS. I looked up red ranges, just to see if they even made ranges in colors any more, if I wanted something that wasn’t the standard white/black/silver. They do make red ranges! But you have to spend $10,000 to get one. What the fuck. White it is, then. I like silver better but our fridge is silver and I swear fingerprints from people three blocks away show up on it.