2023-09-11: you again?; recovery

strange dream last night; again, one of the girls from that long-ago summer, the dream-image wildly off, definitely not her. but my brain understood it to be, to the point where i thought, this isn't her, but it is.

just meeting and saying hi, wandering through an otherwise empty city, through unlit antique shops and down into sprawling basements. but then out of the corner of my dream-eye i see someone else, someone i haven't seen since high school and haven't thought of for a second since our graduation more than a quarter century ago. his face, immediately recalled; his name, too.

this is what i find so frustrating about wanting to remember certain things, but having the details remain frustratingly dark. here was someone i shared a few classes with in four years of high school, who i wasn't unfriendly with but who i barely spoke to, emerging after so many years, his name immediately on my lips. and meanwhile i can't remember anything else about the two worst nights of my life, the details fixed and unchanging, like a photograph. what came before, and what happened after, locked up just beyond my grasp.

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