Short Writing Week 2
Some context here
“It Doesn’t Work”
We sat down at the table on the outside of the cafe having not spoken for close to a decade. We each had a coffee, untouched.
“I dream of you sometimes,” I said straight away. Bland pleasantries had happened already before sitting down. She did not reply, so I had to continue. “When I go to sleep I sometimes have stories I tell myself. Like actual plots, characters, things moving from A to B. Unrelated to, you know, the first thing I said about you and dreams. I’m making a larger point.”
I was floundering, but she nodded, clearly wondering where this was going.
“So one day,” I went on, “I thought it might be worth writing one of them down. I wrote like half a page, a couple of hundred words about some sci-fi thing, and then lost interest in it. It wasn’t great, and I never went back to it, but you know the most interesting thing?”
She evidently did not.
“I never thought of it again. Never used it as a sleep aide. Writing it down had completely removed it from my brain. I want to do the same here.”
“What do you mean ‘the same’?” she asked, leaving me a little relieved that she was actually going to speak and not just stand up and leave.
“We spent a lot of time together and I need to write it down to exorcise it. Even though nothing ever happened. Hell maybe because nothing ever happened. Anyway, this is it, written down, right now.”
“Written down?” I was confusing her.
“Yes, this text that you’re reading, this is it, this is my exorcism. My head-clearing.”
“This… text,” she said, not getting it.
“Yeah. So. This conversation, vocally, out loud, it’s going to exist for just its duration, while we’re here talking. Don’t be too relieved!” - I chuckled at this, she did not - “But since I’m going to write it down and have it leave my brain, it will only live forever as text. This text.”
“You said you dream of me sometimes.”
I did not expect to be indulged like this. Silent acknowledgment was the best case scenario I had prepared for.
“Yeah. Not like, you know, anything inappropriate. I had, as an example, a dream where we met after years or decades and I was married and you were married and we hugged and the small of your back was bare. And that was the whole dream. Or at least what I remember. It’s in the text now so it’s gone, probably for the best.”
“You’re trying to forget that I exist.”
“No, no not at all. I’m just trying to stop dreaming about you. I have no reason to.”
She nodded at this and reached into her bag, coming out with a folded sheet of paper. She held onto it for a second, reinforcing the fold a couple of times, running her thumb and forefinger across it, before handing it over.
“It doesn’t work,” she said, and stood up, striding off before I could object.
I stared into her wake for a few seconds before unfolding the page she had given me.
I dream about this cafe, it said, so I set the meeting to be there. It might help the process. We hadn’t spoken in decades but there was still a tension in him, an awkwardness that had always existed. He said he dreamed about me, and I could only assume they were the same kind as mine. He was writing it down too, like this, a mutual act of forgetting that would ultimately fail. I asked him about his dreams and they were beautiful, but they had to stay dreams. I hope this works for him.