Every night and morning, I dream. Everyone dreams while they sleep, but some don’t remember them. I remember too much, perhaps. I wake with an ache somewhere deep inside me, the only cure to fall back behind the curtain, back into my dream. Because there, I find something beautiful.
I think of dreams as a destination, my mind trekking back up a well-worn path to my past. It can feel so real. I often see my grandmother, who died nine years ago and was one of my best friends. The comfort I feel in those dreams I cannot find in waking life.
Recently, my brain dug up the visage of one of my grade-school peers. His full name, his likeness, everything. I was his friend in the dream. There, I reconnected with him in a way that felt indestructible. We had this shared childhood, so therefore we were twins in some form. We could not not be friends.
I woke with the real feeling that we were reunited friends and that he was only a Facebook search away. So I searched him. And there he was, grown, handsome, married, happy. I wonder if we had somehow kept in touch if we would be the friends my subconscious had imagined.
I know dreams are dreams and reality is a much more complicated state. I’m not going to reach out to him. We hardly talked in school. But it made me think about the way people live in us, whether we allow them in or not.
Some of my rememberings are much more painful. A friend who suddenly decided not to be. A family member that stops talking to you. Or a loved one who passed on. And in these dreams, I am at least partly redeemed to them, or them to me. Like my mind trying to find peace with these missing people.
Whether we realize it or not, we bring them back into our reality in subtle ways. Making tortillas the way grandma made them. Or remembering an inside joke with someone you no longer joke with. Even writing fiction, I see these people wriggling into my characters.
Before this gets cheesy, into the everyone-you’ve-touched routine, you don’t have to want to reconnect with people. Or want to think of the good times. Separation is painful, and it’s OK to not want to relive the memories that keep them omnipresent in our heart. That’s why reality is so harsh. Those brief, fleeting sparks of love or warmth aren’t there to stay.
When these people leave, or we leave them, I think we fill the space where they were, trying to cover up the past relationship with a new one. But they never quite fill the angles and shapes they made inside you. Not the same way, at least. The edges don’t match up. You still see spaces missing. That person was unique. Every person is unique.
So we remember these little pieces, the ones that hurt us most, or gave us the most joy. We can’t help but feel them, carry them. My writing often outlines the shape of my ex-best friend. The shape of a high school crush I couldn’t figure out. The shape of those handfuls of people who brought me so much joy, but I had too much pride to keep reaching out to.
In these treks to the past, and in my writing, all the good memories are possible again, and more.
