What if I’d died? Would she even care? I’m not asking to be melodramatic, it’s genuine curiosity. After she drove away, I didn’t hear from her and it had me wondering. Was it all nothin, were all those dinners we shared just nothing? There were so many in such a short time, and I swear she lingered before she drove away from me. But I guess it was nothing. I can only assume that I was reading into things that never existed.
I had to control my drunk self in order to avoid texting her and I tried my best to assume that she was dead. And good riddance, I thought, that’s one less person who knows my weaknesses. I didn’t want her to be dead. I wanted her to be happy. But I had to imagine her corpse so that I wouldn’t belabor a point that she made clearly enough when she left me. I’ve only ever wished for her happiness.
I started thinking shortly after she left me that maybe I would grow; I knew that I needed to be different in some way. I wanted to move on from her rejection bigger than my yesterday. But could I evolve? And if so, what would I become?
I tried to fly, but no wings would grow and I never levitated when I tried focused meditation. I tried to go invisible, but people still gave me dirty looks when I inhabited public spaces alone, mocking their dependency on the love they displayed openly. I soon realized that miraculous evolution was a joke. So I slept, wrapped in my covers like a cocoon, hoping that when I woke up, I would have acquired the motivation to kickstart my emotional evolution that would help me avoid future situations like the one with the girl of my dreams that was hanging over my head. And in my dreams I saw the life I could have if I were man enough to take it for myself and my dream girl was with me and we still had dinner together every night in the home we shared. In my dreams, I made her laugh and she was always excited to see me. In my dreams she begged me to meet her friends and when I did, we had an amazing time pretending we were younger than we were; we drank like we were still in college and I even let her best friend talk me into smoking marijuana for the first time in a decade. In my dreams, I worked for the government, the local SBI office and I conducted interviews with potential suspects who threatened the security of my state and I wore a badge and a nice suite to raids where SWAT teams banged down doors and I swung into rooms with my gun drawn. I was a man of consequence, unlike my real life where I make decent money but my productivity is measured by how much paper I use.
My dreams were perfect and it was hard not to long for them during every waking hour of my day; and when I could sleep, I lay in it so deeply that my real life – the loser existence that names me – was slipping away. I got worried because my dream girl was more alive than ever and I couldn’t pretend she no longer existed. And then my feelings for her bubbled violently to the surface and I found myself sending text messages that I couldn’t take back. Luckily she never answered.
But then I was back in my dreams that felt so real I could feel every intimate touch I shared with the girl of my dreams. I could smell the dinners I cooked for her in our kitchen and I felt drunk from the drinks we imbibed on quiet weekend nights on our couch sipping wine. It was so real.
I realized that I had evolved when, in my dream, a coworker of my dream girl won the lottery while a bunch of us gathered at our house for a game night and the coworker sat intent listening to the numbers being called. And I remembered the numbers clearly because the coworker ran around chanting them over and over until I was awaken by my alarm clock for work. On my way to work, they announced on the raido that someone had won the lottery and I nearly swerved into the next lane when they announced the same numbers the coworker had been chanting just before I awoke.
I had evolved. I was so full of regrets that I had created a real parallel world where everything was going my way. Of course I didn’t become man enough to make change in my real life, but now, apparently, I’m man enough to shape a better life that I can escape to when my reality is as bleak as it has been. Only, I’m beginning to think that the world in my dreams isn’t really my creation at all. I would have never let my dream girl miscarry our first child, I would never have imagined that. But if I wasn’t responsible for my dream world that felt so real and occasionally accurately predicted things in my boring life, then what had happened to me? And who could answer that question?
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