What is that You Express in Your Eyes?

Last night I stayed up until 1am finishing the second book in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. As one of my friends put it, being a tween is awesome. And the somewhat embarrassing part was that I wasn’t staying up to finish the book because I wanted to finally have it off my conscious and move on; I was up reading because I could not put the book down. Those were real tears streaming down my face when Lena found out about Kostos’ baby mama, and I have no hormonal imbalance to blame that on. After I’d finished, I wondered how crazy I would seem asking Clayton to ride to Wal-Mart with me to see if they had the third book. But he was fast asleep on the couch looking too cute to bother with the gals’ third summer with the magic jeans. So I took him to bed and we went to sleep.

Later that night, but not too long after I’d fallen asleep, I had a horrible dream. I wanted to get out of it so badly, and when I finally forced myself to wake up, I jerked my torso up and I think I might have made some sort of half scream/half cry noise that woke Clayton up, too. I wanted to tell him to go back to sleep, that everything was ok and I’d just had a bad dream. Instead, when I tried to talk, I could barely get out “I had a bad dream” before I fell to pieces. I cried for about ten minutes. I don’t remember crying over a dream since…ever. I’ve had dreams where my mother had passed away and my cousins were getting eaten by King Kong, but nothing ever elicited genuine tears after I’d woken up. It was very, very strange. I felt, for the second time in a few hours, like a child. Turns out, being a tween is not so awesome sometimes.