I appear suddenly in a crowd of people. Initially, they are all blurry, without faces. I am confused, unsure of where I am. However, I know immediately that I’m outside, standing on a paved brick sidewa- no, a courtyard! There are some booths set up around the area, but the only one I actually see at the moment is immediately to my left. I think it’s mid-afternoon, but it’s hard to be sure.
I notice there’s something in my left hand. I raise it up so I can see it better and realize it’s an old, battered student ID from my alma mater. It’s definitely seen better days — the clear veneer that is laminated over the student information on the card is peeling up on the right side and curled over. Then I notice that the date is for the 2016-2017 school year. I know this to be the previous year, and that now I’m back on campus for the 2017-2018 school year. I also know that I need to get my new ID for the year.
So I look around to get my bearings, to figure where I need to go to get my ID, and the people around me have faces now. They’re still a little bit out of focus, but not like before. I start to scan the crowd from right to left but stop almost immediately. A familiar face stands out, a few yards ahead of me and just to the right. She is leaning back on a short brick wall, seated just on the edge with her legs straight, knees locked, feet squarely on the ground. She’s wearing a white top, and her hair is cut to shoulder-length. She’s a regular in my dreams, regular enough that she would get a Supporting Character cast listing if my dreams had end credits, and some part of my sleeping mind does, indeed, recognize that this a dream. She hasn’t put in an appearance in months, though, and her being here now feels uncomfortably out of place. She’s my ex from years and years ago, and she was my first love. We broke up and moved on, lived separate lives. And yet, somehow, now we’re both here, together, on the same campus that isn’t even the right campus. Might we also be back together right now, despite the 15 years since we first went to school together, since we lived separate lives? I don’t really know for sure. But all this slams together in my awareness in less than the space of a heartbeat.
I start toward her, but she moves faster. She heads off to her right and disappears into the crowd, so when I get to where she was, she is nowhere to be seen. Before I can do anything else, there is a hand in my face holding three pieces of paper. The top one has been folded down into a square, the way she and I used to fold love letters to each other, and I can tell from the writing on it that it’s from her. The other two pieces of paper are difficult to see, but one looks like an official yellow slip of some kind and the other is a regular-sized note card. In true dream logic, I will disregard those and they will vanish as soon as I take them from the outstretched hand.
“These are for you,” a guy says. He’s wearing khaki shorts, a red Hawaiian shirt, and a sailor’s hat, while sitting just off to the side in a canvas chair with a beach umbrella over his head.
I reach out and take the papers from him. All my focus is on that folded square. Its existence suggests that she and I are together, but again there’s that uncertainty. I unfold the square. And unfold it again. And again. And again. It’s a large piece of paper, narrow as a sheet of notebook paper but much longer, maybe two-and-a-half feet. Part of it looks like the same kind of paper as a brown paper bag, but not all of it. The face of the note is chaos, words here, images there. It kind of looks like a treasure map, but in reality it’s just a note.
“Why haven’t you talked to me all summer?”
“Are we still together?”
“What happened to you? Where did you go?”
And things like that.
And I have no answers. Apparently we were together at the end of the previous school year, but all that is a blank to me. I have very little idea what happened over the summer-that-wasn’t.
Then time folds and skips a couple of beats, and she’s in front of me, asking me all the same questions to my face. She isn’t yelling at me, not quite, but her voice is raised, and I can hear the worry in it.
At first I have no idea how to answer her. I just stare at her, dumbly, knowing I owe her answers. Because in almost all my other dreams with her, we do get back together. Because in this dream, we were/are together. And we’re still the youthful young adults we were when we first dated.
But for a split second, I just don’t have the answers she needs.
Then memory bleeds in. It’s hazy for a moment, and I have no idea how to reconcile the timeline of events I’m remembering. Because the timeline I’m on doesn’t match hers, doesn’t fit into the timeline of just a single summer apart, a summer forgotten. It’s a timeline from the future, from the now, from a different universe altogether. But that isn’t even what’s important. What I have to say to her is, and it is critical.
“I’m sorry. I forgot. About you, about everything. Blame it on my mental health.” Somehow, that explanation covers all, and she fully understands and accepts it, even though I don’t. But I continue.
“But I have someone else now, and they are amazing. They fit me perfectly. You and I — we just aren’t compatible anymore, maybe never were. I shouldn’t even be here,” and I gesture at the campus around us. “I don’t belong here anymore. I’ve moved on. I’m sorry.”
And then I wake up, badly needing to pee. I lie there for a moment and wonder if my unconscious, sleeping mind just permanently shifted something momentous, if some part of my subconscious finally acknowledged my recent growth. Only future dreams will tell.
