There's a story to this dream, and a story behind the dream that is something that happened in real life. That story was told only the once, and the record of it has been excised and is no longer extant.
But without telling the story, let me tell you that it begins with someone I met almost a lifetime ago, Y.
She was the first girl for whom I felt love, but not necessarilly 'love' as I know it today, or as how I define it today. It was something different, something more pure, I'd say. Besides one small kiss, and a short embrace, there was no physical side to it. And yet, love it was, love we felt, and lo these many years later I still feel that love. In a sense - though it's a far different story - Craig Thompson's 'Blankets' often reminded me of those days of feeling love for the first time.
(All the cartoon and comicbook characters I loved deeply - Gwen Stacy, Elektra Natchios, Jean Grey, Candy Candy, et al - do not count!)
Y died at a very early age, and that's an ache I still remember. Now, what I'm about to tell you may require some suspension of disbelief, but throughout all these years I've had Y visit me, in dreams. and sometimes in waking moments as well. She's a presence that will always be with me.
Last night she visited me and we spoke of some matters that have weighed heavy on me. After I woke up, I stayed in bed for a couple of hours, feeling the warmth in the air slowly permeate me, and my mind lingered on the dream for a bit. The mind tends to wander, and soon I found myself thinking about a girl called Mariana - we were in class together, in the 9th grade, and for some reason I thought she'd be the love of my life.
Now, she never actually gave me me any sort of time of day, but in all fairness - that version of me, that '93 kid decked in cammo shorts, Sepultura t-shirts and a walkman blasting the loudest prophanities wasn't appealing at all to someone such as her. And it's not like I made much effort - though I did do one of the bravest things I ever did then. I somehow cajoled my english teacher to give me access to her record, and I got her address from there. My masterplan was that I'd send her a valentine's card and she'd fall wildly in love with me. I did send it, guess how that played out?
But that feeling for her remained quite a bit after that, though I was never to see her again.
In '95 I joined the Air Force, and at that time I still nurtured the hope that we'd somehow get together, I had this 'An Officer and a Gentleman' type of vision in my mind where she'd see me in uniform, and we'd have loads of babies together and be happy ever after.
Then something strange happened.
I remember one day I was lying in my bunk - I'd chosen the top bunk when I started my basic training - and I was thinking about her and I realized I couldn't even remember what she looked like. This sudden realization led to much of that feeling I was still clinging to begin to ebb away. And I felt so disheartened at this, a part of me thought that love meant that you could never ever forget people - and to become aware that this was so chipped a bit of my soul away.
And that's true for so many people in my life. Even Sílvia, with whom I shared my life for five years, I can barely remember her now. I have a vague impression of her, of course. I have tons of memories of being with her, I remember how much she impacted my life, but her physical self - it's almost gone.
What I see most of the time is a smudge, a blob, something undefined where someone should be.
It's a heartbreaking thing, for me, to realize this. That no matter how much you may have loved someone, time erodes that version of someone that only you got to see and know. These silhouettes of people that haunt us. These faded mirror images are the ghosts that we carry inside.
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