The Ghost of You

I had a dream last night about someone I haven't thought about in a very long time.  Not really, anyway.  There's a stock paragraph that I always repeat when I'm talking about this person.  How I wish I'd met him a year later, or how I wish we still talked. But I haven't thought about him in a very, very long time.  The only thinking I have done about him in the past three years has amounted to a brief remembrance and a fantastic rush of nostalgia that overwhelms me too much to think further.

But that dream was strange.  It took me so thoroughly out of the present, and separated itself so distinctly from the past.  And it's weird, because the most accurate thing I could say would be that I miss him, but I know that in reality, I don't miss him at all.  I don't even miss what he represents.  I think that what this dream is really telling me is that I miss meeting new people.  I miss the adventures that you have when you're never quite sure what's going to happen, what someone is going to do.

And I do.  I do miss that.  Maybe that's why I'm clinging to desperately to these ideas of getting to know someone, of having strange conversations.  Maybe it's why I keep staying up later, in the hopes that something falls away at that time of the morning and someone new lets me in.  But it's not likely to happen.  It's simply not how life is shaping up.  Or rather, it's not how I am shaping my life up to be.  And that makes me sad in some ways.

The only reason I ever think back fondly on those years of my life is that I messed up.  I let myself mess up.  I took many chances, and I fell flat on my face many, many times, and I broke things.  I broke glass bottles and I broke hearts and most importantly I broke myself.  I let myself live wildly and recklessly.  And I think that it was the absolute best time of my life that I could have picked to do that.

But now that it's over, it sometimes makes me sad.  Fairly often, actually.  Because I think back on the unbelievable things that happened and I realize that I have to grow up.  I have to move past them, even though they were brilliant and foolish, terrifying and beautiful.  I need to learn to leave that part of my life in the past, but I have not yet figured out just how to do that quite yet.

So I have these dreams.  About these people I will never see again.  And all of the things that could have happened but didn't.  And never will.  And that is my choice.  But it still makes me a little bit sad.