One of the reasons I'm posting it is because everything up until the phone call is truth. I don't like to write about real things, more specifically my own experiences, in stories. I don't think it translates particularly well for me. But the point of the story is supposed to be the funeral, which wouldn't make sense without the set up at the beginning.
I dunno. Thoughts are appreciated. I kind of don't know what to do with this, I like the actual funeral scene but the lead-up to it and how to close it are escaping me. But hopefully you will enjoy something in it, be it the whole thing or just a word or phrase.
I used to have these dreams.
They weren't like everyone else's. I didn't know they were different for the longest time, until I actually talked about them.
My dreams were mundane. They weren't abstract, incoherent flashes. They were simple, they were normal. But that wasn't what made them different. My dreams were not random events, snippets of errant ideas clad together with no constant.
I used to dream about a school. It wasn't school, the concept of school, it was a school. I returned to this school again and again, learned the layout, learned the students, the teachers. It never occurred to me that dreams should be happening in any other way; I didn't go there every night, but the dreams I remembered, the ones that would stick with me, all took place there.
It actually wasn't always the same school. It changed, without fail, whenever I changed schools in real life. My parents had to move around a lot for work, so I was a classic new kid case. It didn't bother me as much as it did some kids I've talked to. I always found it pretty easy to make friends, there's not so much pressure when you know you'll be gone soon.
So when I would change schools, the one I dreamed in would change too. The first was pretty basic, though it had a massive attic that was the main passageway between classes for the upperclassmen. My very first of these dreams involved my finding my way up there by mistake, and facing their wrath.
One of them was a cruise ship, another a hotel. Both were absolutely massive. If I try to think about it, I can still see the delicate tapestries, the elegant dining rooms, the escalators that seemed to go up or down forever in facilities that defied any conventional architecture.
The last one, perhaps in a cold parallel to the end of high school, was a simple affair. It was almost art deco in its design, a group of small square buildings arranged like a tiny ivory city. There were large courtyards arrayed with tall, simple sculptures. I stopped going there suddenly and unceremoniously when I graduated from high school.
There were themes I seemed to return to. I was almost always late, and it was almost always for some sort of science class. I got lost frequently; though I knew my way around the dream-schools, I seemed to have a penchant for getting myself lost, wandering through the impossibly large and complex hallways and floors. I spent an embarrassing amount of time looking for a bathroom. The classrooms were actually pretty utilitarian for being in a dream despite the exotic layouts, but the bathrooms were bizarre, unintelligible rooms where nothing particularly good ever happened.
Dreams, to me, never felt like something I was creating. They were a place I visited, another life I led, and when I woke up my real life would feel insubstantial and flimsy.
The truth is, life isn't full of rich tapestries, you don't go to school in a grand hotel. You walk into a cold, gray building every day and learn things you're never going to care about once you're not directly responsible for them anymore. Then you go to college, where you're told at once to decide the entire course of your life and waste it away in a sprawling flood of drugs and darkness.
The worst part is that the system works. I trudged through my college years, assuming they were the best of my life, an assumption that was only reinforced by the abysmal office job I ended up in. It's a necessary sacrifice, the hive needs worker bees; if everyone who wanted to be a rockstar became a rockstar the world would fall apart. So, with a complete lack of self-awareness I proceeded down the path to mediocrity that envelops so much of our youth today.
It's pathetic, isn't it? We spend our whole lives preparing for something that we don't even realize we don't want until it's too late. You begin to look over the grand design of your history and see all the things you could have done with yourself, and then you feel horrible for complaining because you have a job and money and so many people would kill for what you've got.
That was the conclusion I came to, after a phone call brought me out of my daze, out of the cloud of denial that kept me from thinking about things too deeply. I didn't recognize the voice on the other end. Turned out I didn't know her at all, but I did know her daughter. Her name was Maggie, and she was dead.
When you've been to three different high schools, you lose track of people easily. However, I was immediately able to recall Maggie. The details of her face were a little blurry but the concept of her was intact in my head. I wasn't sure, however, just where I'd known her. I called Danny from my first school, because he was that guy who somehow got along with everyone when they couldn't get along with each other. He didn't remember her.
The next few calls went the same. No one remembered Maggie. But I did, so distinctly. The truth was, I always had a thing for her. The kind of intense, world-ending crush you could only have on someone you didn't actually talk to. We'd hung out a couple of times, always in groups. We would exchange words, and smile at each other, and then I'd turn away and start talking to someone else. It's ridiculous, isn't it? I suppose it's funny now, but at the time it seemed so huge.
I sat in my cubicle, rubbing my eyes. Some shit you try not to think about. Like I said, we build up these blocks. I remembered my dreams, sure, but I held onto the memories the way I did everything from that time, with a sense of distant wonder. I kept making calls, but I knew that nothing was going to come of it.
Blocks. The only way to keep going in a shit job like this is to not let yourself feel how utterly soul-draining it is. You joke about it, you complain to your coworkers, but you don't explore it, you don't actually dig down and look at your life. Maggie never existed. Not really. She was a dream. One of the people in the schools I used to attend at night when I was asleep. The phone call from her mother was a dream, too. A random subconscious callback to something I hardly thought about anymore.
I guess what really bothered me about the whole thing was how shaken I was by it. Once I was sure she wasn't real, that the phone call wasn't real, I let it go. But something was wrong. Everything seemed insubstantial and meaningless. Here I was, years out of college and no real passion for anything, and I get one dream phone call about a person I didn't really know and all of a sudden I felt like my world is dimmer.
People started to notice it. I was told, on several occasions, that I seemed like I was in a “funk.” I thought about explaining what had happened to someone, but any way I phrased it in my head seemed ridiculous and unbelievable.
I remembered the first time I saw Maggie. It was right before a class, one of the few I actually managed to be on time for. There was a small pavilion outside the lecture hall, and she was sitting with a kid I'd gone to elementary school with and a couple of people that I was actually classmates with at the time. They were talking, and I said hi as I passed. Her hair came to me again first; she had this short brown bob, but it was edgy and uneven, as if she'd cut it herself. She used too much makeup, I remembered thinking, but somehow it worked for her. Eyeliner applied a little too liberally outlined blue orbs that seemed impossibly big. Her features should have been too exaggerated, like caricatures, but somehow they combined perfectly. She was beautiful.
Her image was so clear, now. The more I thought about her, the more real she seemed to become. And she was dead.
I'm not sure when it was that I decided I was going to go to her funeral. It was an insane idea; you don't choose what you dream about. But I had gotten the phone call. She was a friend. And I felt a sense of duty that was stronger than anything I had experienced in years.
I started to try and draw maps. I figured if I was going to dream about the things I used to dream about, I had to try and make sense of them. I couldn't get much down; there were some rooms and hallways I remembered, but in general it was a dead end. It was too utilitarian, I think. This was about feeling, about emotion.
So I drew her instead. It started as an idle exercise while I was at my desk, just something I did to kill some time. When I got home I did another, though, and within a week I had an entire notebook filled with them. I saw her so perfectly in my head, but she wouldn't translate at all to paper. I've never been an incredible artist but I had some talent, so it was frustrating not to be able to capture her.
All that time, I kept trying to have the dream. I would think about her as I lay in bed at night, try to imagine her funeral. The sound of her mom's voice, the way she looked back in high school. Nothing worked. I had drearily boring dreams about nothing, but never about Maggie.
FAST FORWARD BECAUSE I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO PUT HERE
My eyes closed slowly, and I remember thinking that I was hearing rain, but it had been crystal clear outside. As I adjusted to the dark greens and grays, the cold rain soaked into my jacket. I took a deep breath. Asleep. I didn't have to think about it, I knew it. I looked around, saw the gravestones.
Well, then. Time to say goodbye.
It was a little distracting, at first. I had forgotten the feeling of seeing so many people from different parts of my life. Someone I bumped into once and had never seen again was standing next to me. His head was down, so we didn't make eye contact. They all looked so grown up. All this time I hadn't been dreaming about them, but I still managed to construct them. Or maybe I wasn't constructing anything. I had given up on the notion that this was my world. Maybe I created it to begin with but this place, these people were their own entities. I was only visiting.
I noticed a couple of sidelong glances. It wasn't surprising; I'd been gone for years. As the preacher started to speak, I found it hard to follow what he was saying. I'd forgotten how people speak in dreams, the non-sequiturs and fragments that everyone seemed to be gleaning meaning from. I closed my eyes and let the sound of the rain fill my ears, felt it weighing down my suit.
It was all so terribly poetic. A funeral in the rain, old friends coming together, saying goodbye to a girl I never got to know well enough. I hated it. Life isn't like this. Life isn't cinematic, it's not pretty. None of this was real, I knew that, and yet I had never felt this way about a real person. I bit my lip and closed my eyes tighter, attempting to staunch tears. I couldn't do it. I was crying, and I was ashamed of myself. I was crying for Maggie, that stupid girl I could never quite talk to, the person who made all my real-life crushes seem less important without me ever realizing what was going on.
But I was crying for myself, too. For all the time I'd wasted in my life, for all the decisions I'd made and all the things I did that suddenly seemed so insufficient in her presence. I knew that I'd wake up soon, that I'd probably never see any of these people again, that I would go back to my life and have to go on knowing that Maggie was dead.
I bit my lip harder, and I could taste a hint of metal as I broke the skin. I was angry. Angry at this stupid world, for feeling so much more real to me than my reality. I was angry at Maggie, for bringing me back here, reminding me of everything I used to have, the world inside me that I gave up. And for making me feel this strongly. For a moment, I hated her.
People began to shuffle out, talking amongst themselves. A couple of people came up to me, shook my hand. One of them had died in real life, a few years back – I couldn't look him in the eye. Soon it was just me and the grave, and I sat down on the spongy turf and stared at the fresh-dug mound of earth, turned to mud by the downpour.
“Hey, Maggie. I have to admit, I don't really know what to say here. I mean, we never really talked much. I don't know why you wanted me here. Why I had to be here. I don't know what I am to this world, whether it's something I made for myself because my real world wasn't good enough or --”
I paused for a minute, then sighed and continuee.
“Okay, listen. Ever since I heard about you death, all I could think about has been how much my life sucks. How different this place was. I don't know. Maybe none of it really matters. Maybe it's all just a bunch of synapses firing off in my head while my brain rests. But goddamn it, I miss you. Two weeks ago I didn't even remember that you existed, and now all I want is to see you again. If I could have just dreamed that...
“It's not fair to you, I know. You don't make the rules. Neither do I, I guess. I just wanted to tell you that I wish we'd gotten to know each other better. That I don't get what all this shit means. And that I hope that you're at peace.”
When I woke up, my pillow was still damp. After being in that black suit, heavy with rain, I felt so much lighter. I sat on the edge of my bed, with my eyes closed. There was supposed to be closure. There was supposed to be meaning. I was supposed to make peace with my dreams and wake up with a new sense of self-worth. But all I felt was that I couldn't really be sure of anything.
I showered and got ready for work, and tried to put it all into perspective. It wasn't like I could just quit my job and suddenly lead a life as rich as the one I had in dreams. The world doesn't work like that. You take what you can get, and hopefully you come out of it happy and healthy.
I used to have two worlds. I had lost the one, until recently. But then Maggie died. And she reminded me what I had lost. I can't say for sure I've lived my life any differently since. Every dream ends, no matter how much we wish it would linger. Maybe it's for the best. This is the real world, or at least the one where I spend the most time. I have to continue to try and make things work. But maybe it's just enough that I remember.
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