A dream I had last time…


I stood with my friend at the side of the building… at the side of a building, for it wasn’t somewhere I’ve known in my memory, it was somewhere I knew in my heart. The road was of red sand and dust, a desert. The sun was blazing. Hot. Humid. No one to be seen in miles. Just a desert of red sand. I couldn’t help but admire who constructed such a building on the outskirts of a desert… of a memory.
The roaring of a car was heard in the distance, and then a dark blue Mercedes appeared, going up the road in a cloud of red dust. I approached the car while my friend waited by the building leaning against the wall, protect from the sun by some tattered awning of an abandoned store.
When I approached the car she opened the window and pocked her head out. It was she. Mixed feelings of passionate longing and reserved greetings overwhelmed me. I wanted to… she gave me an air kiss, and told me that she’s going to park at the end of the road, and come back. I saw her son sitting on the passenger seat. He’s supposed to be a grown up now, but I still only see the child in him. He grinned. I waved.
I walked back to my friend to wait for her there. I told him it was she. He blabbered something about how sexy she used to be and how he sometimes fantasized about her. I dismissed this conversation with a stern look. It always made me uncomfortable when anyone talked about her this way, justified by her provocative appearance … and thought that I am not going to partake in this. We’re not bonding over this. In any case, I was so engrossed in the idea of seeing her again. It has been what it felt more than a decade, or was it a decade… I felt nervous, and decided to walk down the road to meet her half way. I took my shoes off for some reason and decided to go barefoot on the hot sand. It relaxed me.
“what a surprise. I haven’t seen you in ten years” I said
“I know. You never came back to visit” she said with a beaming smile.
Guilt passed through me. She was someone memory safeguarded for years, there in my heart, with an unwavering feeling of… friendship. Guilt of not returning to see her again, guilt of not returning at all, guilt of moving on… I wondered if I did actually move on, or that it is my old life that simply abandoned me altogether. I tried to give in the usual rhetoric about being busy, and how life gets in the way, but I couldn’t…
“You’re son is a grown man now” was all I could muster.
“Yeah, he’s in college now,” the proud mother in her spontaneously replied.
“You look great,” I said.
“Yeah?” she answered with a little bit of surprise and a little bit of satisfaction.
“You look the same.” I added.
She lowered her eyes and said almost apologetically: “This weather… this humidity.. it makes me look 52.”
I looked at her and was lost at words…
“I colored my hair this morning,” she said coquettishly…
I was then overwhelmed by a feeling of loss. Because maybe she did look older. And maybe her words that it’s the weather that made her look older were to console me. That it’s just the weather. The same way we blame everything on the weather… And it was not because she got older, it’s because I was not there when it happened. Because I would have liked, when I saw my past again, that it would still look exactly the same. Not a day older. I felt selfish thinking that… because after I left, people went on with their lives… and I couldn’t help thinking about her life without me. Not that I was a significant part of her life. I was just a friend. A close friend. But still. At that moment, her whole life – at least from my perspective – flashed in front of me. Getting her medical degree in a different world… in a world I constructed in my mind from Kundera’s novels during the communist times… traveling across countries to settle in a country of war. To make a family, a career… some worked out some not… but I couldn’t help thinking that years were wasted in dead ends.. with her career, with a husband… a lot of idle years passed by… and then I realized that this is life, not just her life… but Life. No regrets. And all my pitiful looks transformed into admiration for her as a woman. An accomplished woman who had it all. Maybe not all, but who at least had a life, blissful, tragic, painful, dreadful… a life.
And I couldn’t help thinking about how some of us perceive life… we think we should take all the chances, play all our cards at once… go after the unattainable.. and I remembered Brel singing at the Olympia, wearily like a tired traveler “Rêver un impossible rêve… tenter, sans force et sans armure, d'atteindre l'inaccessible étoile… telle est ma quête”
And I felt tired myself…
And I felt silly…
And I woke up.