in love
I dreamt last night about a girl I met once at a bar. She was really cool. Witty. An English major like myself. We talked about the meanings we assign to everything–the snow, the smoke, the day of the year.
I woke up and the dream faded from my mind. All day I felt like something was missing. It wasn’t until I sat down to continue a story that I realized I had had one of those happy dreams. The ones where I’m happily involved in a deep and meaningful way with a girl without any messy real life problems.
The happy dreams are all the same, the girl is idealized to such an extent that her real-life counterpart could not possibly compare. The problem this time, with this dream, was that the girl did not have a real-life counterpart at all. She is a character I made up for the purposes of this story.
Maybe it’s time to give the h. character a happy ending. We’ve been through so much together: love, loss, debauchery, even a fake death. If it were in his power to give me a happy ending, I’m sure he would do it.
Or not. Everything he has gone through has been at my whim. None of the bad things that have happened to him over the years would have happened under the watch of a more merciful… scribe, weaver of fate, god, what have you. What happens to him is a reflection of what has happened to me. If I truly do not believe that someone is tugging at my strings, why do I tug on the strings of my fictional counterpart instead of allowing him control?
Maybe he is the one exerting his control on me, forcing me to act like him. After all, I didn’t use to drink until I thought it could bring my character some tension and conflict. When I didn’t smoke, my character had nothing to do with his hands. When I was a boy and read in the library instead of playing sports, was my character trying to pick up pointers from his fictional brothers? Was he there all along, ensuring that I would stay on a path that would guarantee his painful, but continuing existence?
Now I’ve gone over my own head. If I were stoned I would be freaking out right now.