Seeing an old friend in several alternate realities
“You look different,” I say.
He puts his hands in his pockets casually, unlike the way he’d shove them in and stiffen his shoulders in real life. I glance at the loose red button up he had tucked into his cuffed jeans. He looks like a boy fresh out of high school, who moved to LA in order to get his indie band some traction. Which isn’t bad—just really out of character. He’s never tucked in his shirts. Has he started to?
“I wanted to change things up.”
We stand outside of a grocery store. A Metro, maybe, or even a Safeway (a reminder of a life back in high school, back in California). It’s dark and the fluorescent lighting shines harshly in my eyes. He leans against the wall, blasé.
My body swirls when I look down. I can’t tell what I’m wearing, and the rest of the world around us devolves into a blur of neon, incomprehensible to my dreaming eyes. We’ve never met like this—at school would’ve been more realistic, or in my Honda, while driving him home. No, we never met in the dark.
“You wanna talk right now?” I ask, breaking the silence. Anxiety burns in my stomach.
“Maybe in a bit,” he replies. What are we gonna talk about? What do I even want to say?
In my blurry vision, he fades away.
I wake up with a headache, grasping at the scraps of memories of my dream so I could write them down, or text its contents to a friend, remember it somehow.
guess who I dreamt about again
Half my face is buried under my grey blanket. The bright Toronto sun shines straight through my dorm windows. I rub my eyes, comb out a part of the bird’s nest of my hair, and set out to go about my day, not giving him another thought.
He’s become a recurring character, but a shapeshifting one. Every time, he appears differently, with someone different, but he always ends up interacting with me one way or another. There’s enough truth in the dreams—enough to make me believe we’re truly interacting with each other again. But there’s also always a lie. Sometimes he’s too happy to see me, sometimes not happy enough. Sometimes he’s friends with faceless strangers, sometimes alone, too alone. And sometimes his hair is too curly.
The last time that we talked was on the cusp of lockdown, and then we lost touch. Our friendship petered out; we weren’t dedicated enough to put in the time and effort to replicate any previous real-life interactions over some sort of digital medium. It left something more to be desired.
On another night, I think he hates me.
“Can I have just the, um, classic poke bowl, please?”
“We don’t have premade recipes here. You have to customize your own bowl,” he tells me. I’m taken aback for a moment. There’s no menu for me to look at.
I try to tell him that, but his expression makes me falter. He looks bored and sick of seeing me. I resist the urge to tell him that his work apron is tied incorrectly. Its dark grey color begins to bleed onto him, until I can’t tell what he’s wearing underneath.
“Okay, well, can I have…” I bite my lip. He doesn’t say anything at my pause, even as I don’t speak for another few seconds. And then another few. He just stares, stealing glances at his friends. They all look like a blur to me. I can’t tell if there’s three, four, five of them. I just know they’re making inside jokes that verge on homoeroticism and enjoying their poke bowls, and that he evidently wants to hang out with them more than he wants to see me.
I give up on ordering. My hands blend into the counter I’m clenching.
“What’s going on?” A faceless employee asks from behind him.
Something’s wrong. He’s never had a job before.
guess who—
him, again?
yep
bruh
My friends and I treat it as an inside joke; we keep it light, a reminder that all these dreams don’t really mean anything. I can’t help but wonder, though, when I wake up—half conscious, riding out the emotions that felt real, and having not told anyone what I saw—whether he started wearing loose button ups, or got a job at a restaurant with exceedingly horrible customer service, or made any new college friends. Maybe he’s become a perfect embodiment of one of the strange alternates I see in my dreams. I have no clue.
The dreaded thought of never reaching out again settles in. It’s been far too long, and sending a random text feels so painfully awkward. The sentiment is exacerbated as nighttime approaches, and it sometimes carries me into sleep.
I’m back in high school, in an English teacher’s classroom, with a growing pit in my stomach. A long wooden table, much longer than the one I remember and reminiscent of the Round Table, is placed in the center of the room. I sit on the edge at the far end near the entrance, taking in the familiarity of the ugly grey-green carpet and the notes on the whiteboard. He sits on the other side, sharing the throne-like chair with his… girlfriend? Yes, his girlfriend, a blonde girl with her hair tied back and a floral dress that was as bright as her grin. I’ve never seen her before in my life.
Afternoon light from the windows shines down on them. I don’t know how those two got there, when they started dating, who admitted their crush first, but I can’t help but smile to myself. For them.
His hand slips into hers, and the world melts.
I stand outside the cafeteria, soaking up the last moments of sun before winter approaches.
“Hi!” He greets me from behind. I turn around. He looks normal this time, or at least more like the way he looked last time we hung out, and excited to see me. He probably wants to talk again; it’s been a while.
“Hey,” I reply. I start walking, to nowhere in particular, and so does he.
“I was thinking we could talk,” he said.
“Sure. I’m down.”
