Butterfly Dreams

I wake up, most days, not knowing where, or when, or even who I am. This is not a disorientation of alarm-jangled nerves, but rather the slow, stuporous haze of switching from one state of being to another.

Truth: As long as I am asleep, I will dream. I have had five-minute snoozes in lecture halls that result in my utter conviction that, midway through the economics of an oligopoly, my lecturer decided to expound on the virtues of Baywatch (and notes, mind you, to that effect). Nod-offs on the train are soaked in visions of home, or Enid Blyton biscuit trees, and arrival at my station is more often than not a doubled slap of cold air and reality.

But the worst, the worst are the dreams that wrap me, hold me in the night. The ones where the people I know I’ve known for years. We have a past, but our future doomed to end in Nokia’s beeps. My friends are childhood, friends-forever-keep-kept-in-touch-always friends, and I know them better than anyone. I have boyfriends, lovers, husbands even, children I watched grow up. I have memories.

And then I wake up, and it’s a struggle every morning to drain these false memories, shades of loved ones, shadows of lives. I cannot mourn them, because they didn’t die. I am puzzled, then heartbroken, and then puzzled again; in too-rapid seconds I go from imcomprehension, to realisation, to the inevitable forgetting of a history that never was.

I’ve lived thousands of lives by now, lost thousands of loves, wanted to say goodbye thousands of times, but have not had a single chance to say it.

It’s scary that it’s so easy to slip into these pockets of unlived moments, and that this life, this real one, is so easy to leave behind. Wonder if one day, it’d be for good. Wonder which would be preferable, death, or an eternity of dreams. Wonder if there’s a difference.