Thursday 15 August 2013

The Wall

I have hit it in a big way.

Not the wall I've been writing about, but the wall the general populace speak of in regards to not being able to go anywhere.

Yeah, I've been sick. Yeah, I have writer's block. But the thing that got me the most was the fact I had the same dream as my oldest friend on the same night.

I was with my girlfriend. We were absolutely in love, the way that comes around once, maybe twice, in a lifetime. There were no pretenses. There were no walls. Leah was there every now and then and we were all happy, celebrating something. I think it was my birthday. Leah had a friend but I couldn't see her very well. It didn't matter. It was the perfect day.

Leah sent me a text this morning. The friend was Brooke (a good friend and an ex-housemate) but otherwise the details were near identical. The thing is, Leah (and Brooke) lives twelve-hundred kilometres from me and we see each other roughly annually. My girlfriend isn't real (I'm single), but we had dream-perfect descriptions of her, as good as a dream can be considering the shifting nature of dreamstuffs.

I woke up at 2:30am and as I gained consciousness I lost the glow of the dream. I entered the harsh reality, the headache, heartache and malaise of someone who has been in a once-in-a-lifetime love and is currently isolated due to Honours.

I didn't blame my choices. I thought about them. I couldn't stop thinking about them, and I couldn't sleep.

I couldn't cry either. That's not a new thing, but it might have been useful considering the circumstance.

Instead, I turned to my research for solace. I put on a fairly thoughtless, immediate program and watched it until I fell asleep.

You know what? That shit works. 'Realism', even in cartoon (anime) format, is a great way to ignore what is actually happening, or bypass it in the interim of being absorbed into the representation of something else.

The sleep I had was shithouse, but it was sleep I wouldn't have had otherwise.

When I crawled out of bed I read. Then I wrote a little. The reading was wide and the writing slim, but it was in a reasonable direction, kind of laying the groundwork for things to come.

I went to work and I told a couple of my friends about my shared dream. They were as surprised as I, but took the whole thing pretty well.

Then a girl walked in. We talked a bit. I didn't do my usual customer service jokes either. Instead I was me. She was she.

I'm not saying she was the girl from the dream either, but she had a fair bit in common. What was best was that she seemed to be pretty okay with me, no bullshit. It's hard to tell a dream in person, especially with the nature of dreams, but if two people can have the same dream then maybe dreams can bend into reality. Who knows?

I got busy and couldn't direct attention to anything non-work because my boss was around, but we caught eyes on the way out and hers reminded me of another dream I had years back.

They were the exact same shade as my son's, the one who most certainly doesn't exist. Not yet anyway.

I hope she comes back. I have nothing to go on other than a shared dream, a hunch and a chance encounter.

So the wall is here. Its more than writer's block, more than loneliness and more than a whole host of other things that get in the way.

But maybe there's a way to climb it. And maybe I'll figure it out. And maybe a hunch, a shared dream and a chance encounter is enough for more than just this wall.







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