Ever Since the Day We Met

The clearest of dreams are often thought to be reinterpretations of our own realities. If this is the case, my reality is defined by loneliness, sexual apprehension and the paint job on my dented car, set against the beat of “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand” by Primitive Radio Gods; the reprise “I’ve been downhearted baby/ever since the day we met” playing over and over, volume constantly adjusting to fit the scene.

It was strange. I was surrounded by people, faces both familiar and fresh, were given new lives. Loud, gregarious aquaintances were suddenly pensive and withdrawn. Forgotten friends from years past suddenly stood at my side. And a tall, blonde girl with an indistinguishable face named Bree was at the center of my attention. I remember little of what she said, but I do recall an eagerness in her voice; an anxiety that came from a desire to do too much in too little time.

On this particular evening, she wanted to dance. Standing beside her and two unidentified friends, I stood near the wall on the second floor of a parking garage. The ceiling was uncomfortably low, but the throng of equally eager and carefree 20-somethings either did not notice or they did not mind. Bree stepped forward a few steps towards a growing opening in the center of the pulsating crowd. She turned to me as she continued to walk backwards and stretched out her hand. She wanted me to follow her. To dance with her. To join her for a life of forward motion and sponteneity. But I could not move.

She melted into the crowd, the parking structure, the thin green lawn that preceeded it, into the world around her. No. She didn’t melt away. I was pulled back. As her hand has reached out, the power and irrationality of my dreaming mind interrupted itself midthought; my brain depriving me contentment and companionship. Bemoaning the lost opportunity, I found myself standing in another parking garage. This lot, however, was much smaller, outside and set on a slight incline. Two empty spots lay at my feet and not a soul could be seen or heard. Regardless of my isolation, I remember having a troubled dialogue concerning the paint job on my recently repaired car. Even at the time I realized the situation’s mundane nature, yet the conflict proved itself surprisingly profound. I settled on white, the car’s original color. Not a sparkling, clean white of Greek democracy and new Ipods but rather a white that spoke of age and use. A white that was imbued with dirt and exhaust.

Throughout the course of the evening, I traveled between that parking lot and the garage where Bree once stood with her hand outstretched, but she had left me behind after my first disappearance. She had probably joined the cacophony of human bodies in the middle of the garage. I thought about her as much as one could in a dream. Tried to remember her face, her words and the voice that had breathed life into them. And as I dreamed, I dreamed a second time that I had taken her hand and joined her. I dreamed that I dreamed that her and I meant something. That she was something important in me or something I needed or something that needed to be found. But everytime I would stop and remember the truth. That I had left her. That she had gone ahead with her life in an  attempt to experience everything in life before her time was up. That I was standing in two empty parking spaces, having an imaginary debate over an imaginary car while she danced the night away.