Last night, like every night, I had a dream. It was a very clear, and very strange dream.
IT WENT LIKE THIS:
I was floating a few feet off the ground through the streets of Oakland around Lake Merritt as though I were wearing hover boots. It was not just any day by Lake Merritt . . . my brain had sent me back in time to a specific day in fall 2013 when my cousin Jack and I had ridden our bicycles down Grand Avenue around Adams Point. I remember on that day the sunlight was golden in that autumnal way, and the trees were yellow and orange and shedding their leaves. Jack was in front of me and I was riding behind him. I wrote of that day, a long time ago now:
I felt a little better biking through Oakland . . . a cute girl smiled at me and I almost slammed into a car because I was looking at her. I rode by a toy store and a bubble machine was blowing bubbles all over the place and I went right through them. And I thought “Yeah, okay . . .”
Between then and now, I have lived out nearly 4,400 days. In the grand scheme of things, that day by the lake was a fairly unremarkable one . . . and yet I have remembered it with total clarity and a sentimentality that borders on wounding me. That day is worth remembering because I had been struggling, and doing something as simple as spending time with my cousin on a nice fall day was a reprieve from my many woes. Nothing was wrong . . . I felt a sort of lightness that was badly needed.
Two weeks ago, I went to my cousin’s wedding in Virginia and watched him tear up at the altar as his fiancée walked down the aisle. A few minutes later, they were married. I felt so happy for them both . . . Jack is like a brother to me, and it was a special day for everyone in attendance. I was lucky to be there to bear witness to it all.
So why does it hurt me now to remember that day with my cousin of all days? Perhaps my brain had taken me to that sad pocket of my memories where I had to come to terms with the fact that my cousin lives now in a different realm than me, one in which I will likely never occupy. He and I were roommates back then and barely had any money, and yet we went on many adventures together, and hung out with old friends and new freaks, and traveled to strange places in the middle of the night just for the sake of the song . . . it was a little corner of time that you can only experience in that way once, which is when you’re young. Newly married Jack is a million miles away from all that, and I’m sure he’d choose his current circumstances rather than those wild days from long ago, however fun he may dimly recall them now. Pathetically, I would still choose that time over whatever this is.
I wrote this in Berlin in January 2020, not long before the world as we knew it ended. In that essay, I encapsulated those feelings which I still possess better than I could right now, so I may as well drop it here:
In my dream, it’s always nighttime, and I’m in my old cop car roaring around Oakland looking for something to do and hoping anyone at all is awake. Sometimes I’m with this girl I used to know, who I also can’t get out of my head, and who moved down to LA years ago. Other times I see my cousin, who I also haven’t seen in years. I don’t even know where that guy is now, but there he is in the passenger seat of the Doomsmobile going about a hundred miles an hour on 580, or riding our bicycles in the dark down in the Lower Bottoms. And then there’s the old Victorian house in West Oakland, in Ghost Town, where we had bonfires every night, the neighbors hopping over the fence to be with us there when they heard us chopping wood. It’s like the fella said: My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings. I have spent much longer recalling this time than I actually lived it. Back then it went by quickly and was gone before I realized it was gone. In my head, and in my dreams, I have stretched it out into a figure 8 superhighway of endless recollections. I can find anything inside of those memories if I really want to . . . can find the various equations and strange encounters that Frankensteined me into whatever it is I became and still am. It was fun back then because it was difficult and nebulous. None of us had any money or ever really slept. I was gaunt and greasy. My cousin and I would hop in the car and drive down to LA at two in the morning for no good reason, guzzling lukewarm coffee in mason jars, and smoking a whole pack of cigarettes over many hours as we ripped through the dark hills knowing that whenever it was we got there, we’d be sleeping in the car next to Silver Lake . . . and waking up to the beating sun, prompting us to get cheap diner food, and aimlessly piloting that big bastard all over the place, blitzed on Adderall and barely enough gas money between the two of us to make it back to Oakland. That was good stuff. But he’s long gone now, and so are all of those people and all of those places.
Back in reality, in the here and now, I saw that girl in LA about six months ago now, and she’s a different thing now. She’s doing real well. She’s sober, and so on. I just don’t know this version of her is all. I knew her as someone else. I’m sure she’s glad to be rid of her old self, and here I am still missing her. And somehow this prompted me to contact my cousin also, having not seen him in some time now, and he was indignant that I’d bothered to say anything to him at all. I guess I’ll probably never see him again, and maybe I won’t ever see her again either. I can’t imagine why I would. The fact that all of this is good and dead, compounded with the fact that the people who populated it are as good as gone, makes sleep unbearable to me. That’s why I never want to do it. I can’t be rid of it. The real tragedy is that my mind always places me there as who I was back then, because that is the only lens through which to see it. If a wormhole opened up right now and I stepped inside, and appeared again in that möbius strip of time as present day me, it would almost make me sick, because then I would know the truth of it, which I dimly know now and look away from, which is that it was a bunch of childish nonsense that I have romanticized to escape the sorrow I feel now because everyone else has changed except for me and I’m the only one who remembers and is cursed by these useless dream-images of the past. It’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ with no guide . . . just me fumbling in the dark behind the curtains of my own stupid life!
You might liken this horrifying sensation to rewatching a movie you liked as a kid, only to realize it’s total shit. It makes you wonder what you really even know at all. There is only this and the forward path. I know that. But now that I am alone with it, watching everyone around me slow down and soften, I can’t help but question myself. I’m still wearing the same beat up denim jacket with train ticket stubs and plastic cigarette filters in the chest pocket. What’s waiting on the other side? Fucking television and fuel-efficient cars and eight hours of sleep. Maybe it’s not fun anymore and hasn’t been in years, and though I can’t revive the dead thing that I miss, which is just a bunch of warped Polaroids I cradle behind some locked door in my head, I can’t seem to make something new either, which is why I go back to it again and again as though it were a haunted amusement park. I have made scarecrows out of all of these people, and populated a cardboard diorama with them. They are ageless and frozen there while my eye sockets get darker and darker when I see myself in the mirror. This girl and I are still in Cafe Van Kleef in downtown Oakland and she’s asking me to kiss her, even though I don’t want to because there are people around us, but I do it anyway and I’m glad I did. And I’m still with the Mead guys in the back of Ruby Room on a Wednesday night, chain smoking and talking about driving up to Grizzly Peak at last call. What happened to what used to happen, man? My sickness unto death is bearing the burden of Christmas past! I can’t help it: I’m wild at heart. If it’s not fun it’s not worth doing . . . and I know that if I stopped believing in myself then there will be no one left to believe in me, and I’d finally vanish. I miss these people who are gone. Do they miss me too? The worst feeling in the world is knowing you never meant as much to that other person as they did and still do mean to you. It can’t have all been for nothing, though grimly I know now that it was. It had to end, and it did. Time bottlenecked into this and left me here alone on the other side. Where are you now? Have you left me the last of the dum dum daze? Where are you now when I need your noise? The walls close in and I need some noise. . . .
My dream ended and I awoke feeling like I could barely breathe. I felt this enormous sadness, almost a sort of panic, and stayed that way for several hours WHILE THE WAKING WORLD CONTINUED ON. Eventually the feeling passed through me and turned to ghostly vapor, having no alternative, until I inevitably dream that dream once again.
