the nightmare

this morning i woke up suddenly in a dazed sweat, the urge to pee having whipped me out of a horrific scene unfolding behind my eyes - a nightmare about an old college roommate and once close friend, someone who i haven’t seen or spoken to in years.

it’s strange how certain dreams take on the quality of movie scenes - in this case, one with a particularly Cronenberg-esque cinematography. Ulrich and I - although he wasn’t the same Ulrich i know in real life - had driven up to Robin’s house on a hunch that something bad had happened to her. sure enough, it was obvious that something was off as soon as we entered and began wandering the labyrinth of rooms. as we walked past stifled gray walls with the distant, staticky glow of a broken television casting fuzzy silhouettes around us, i noted that there were no overt signs of violence or a struggle - yet the peculiar placement of objects and the general air of the house suggested that Robin had been kidnapped or forcibly removed against her will. i felt the urge to leave, and as we made our way out i looked out of the kitchen window and saw a man in the driveway wearing a cowboy hat and watching us through a pair of binoculars. Ulrich and I made a run for it, piling into his beat-up van - this is how I knew it was a different version of Ulrich, as the Ulrich I know would never own such a jalopy - and then, suddenly, I woke up.

Robin had been one of my closest friends in college, and also the one whom I fought with the most intensely. we seemed to love each other in a way which had a profound capacity to injure; our friendship was a double-edged sword. the last time i saw her was on my trip to visit her in seattle 9 years ago, just before I moved to Pittsburgh for my last job - the same job i left last may after establishing permanent residence in germany. Robin and I used to play games where we would ask each other outlandish questions, like: “if i were an object in a first grade classroom, what would i be?” Robin said I’d be a ruler because i liked to judge. i don’t think she saw the tears forming behind my eyes as i looked away. we traveled to Taiwan together with my mom during spring break of our sophomore year of college, where she fell suddenly ill one night with something resembling typhoid fever. i held her hand in the ER waiting room as we watched a wailing woman push a stretcher with a body draped in a bedsheet down the hall; Robin mumbled something about being trapped in a third world country before fainting. sometime after Amy died, Robin presented me with a framed picture of the last Facebook profile picture she’d had, a blue-and-white sketch of a young boy pulling a fishing net backwards from a vast ocean spilling forward, pregnant with life and possibility.

and then, after my trip to seattle, our text messages slowly dwindled to only the obligatory annual birthday greeting. i wonder if it was something i’d said during that last visit. Ulrich has never met her except in yesterday’s nightmarish romp through her abandoned house.

i remember sitting in the courtyard of our union square dorm building back in New York one night, finishing off the bottle of red wine we had smuggled in and out of a movie theater with us. we tried our best to avoid shrapnel from the cork we had jammed down the throat of the bottle as we took turns chugging from it. inhaling a drag from her marlboro red, i asked: “do you think we’ll still be friends in ten years?”

i don’t remember how she answered. i think i’ll text her tomorrow.