I’ve been sick for over a month. It sucks. I’m not going to sugar coat that. I’m at the point now where I think it’s bounced all around my upper skull and is now settling into my throat. I have almost no energy. Thursday at work I got woozy a few times, and once I had to literally dash to sit down because I was a little dizzy. It’s not the best way to spend one of the most intense months of the academic calendar.
The cold medicine– right now I’m on Theraflu bandwagon and it seems to be helping a bit– tends to ramp up my dreams. Last night’s was particularly weird (though not as weird as the one the night before about a cursed Roots movie poster and living as a flea market merchant trying to avoid said poster). I used to have this recurrent dream that I found out I needed a grade in a class I had never attended to finish graduating from high school so that I could receive my PhD (like I’d somehow slipped past high school). It was that dream, but instead of my high school, I was getting my education in what was basically a resort city full of androids like Westworld, only it was modeled around a part of Indianapolis I used to hang out in as a youngster. There was a figure in the “park” that didn’t fit in– like the woman in the red dress thing in the Matrix. I had to chase that figure down in order to find my way to the secret area where the class I had to pass was taking place, which resulted in a sort of Assassin’s Creed style hunt through a fake Indianapolis.
The mystery woman I had to catch was an ex-girlfriend of mine from high school. Well, no. It was an android modeled after her. It had a USB drive in its neck that held all the assignments I had to complete for the class. I found her, and we had to play out our breakup as a “password” for me to obtain the USB drive.
I think in this version of the dream I finally passed the class, but I woke up as I was hanging off of the bottom of the rigging that held together the faux Indianapolis, looking down at what appeared to be the ruined real world thousands of feet below it. It was a strange dream.
The dream isn’t really what I am thinking on today, though. I hadn’t thought about that particular girl in 20 years, give or take. She hurt me pretty bad at the time, but I got over it, then I encountered her randomly again in a college class and we had a platonic friendship for a semester, then she faded away as I went off about my life. When we were together she’d pined after this other guy (well, not while we were together, but she was rebounding from him, I think, when we met, and I was rebounding from my friends sort of just drifting away as we all looked toward college). Turns out she ended up back with him, and they’re married, and they have a kid. They’re super-religious. They seem happy.
When I woke up, the dream left me curious. I decided to do a little drowsy recon. I came across an old abandoned blog that belonged to her (you’d be shocked what stays in Google from MySpace, folks–you leaving doesn’t mean the account isn’t live), and it just so happened that the second from the mos recent post talked about a crisis of faith and life-changing period in her life. That period was literally the time we were together, and all the things she recalled as asking herself were the things that happened when I tried to explain how my Cherokee worldview works. I wasn’t mentioned. She remembered it as questions she’d asked herself.
Funny.
Interesting.
I don’t know.
The reason that I mention it here is that I’ve always had this theory. I think there are things we need in order to become who we are (who we always were going to be, who we are meant to be), and I think that we are forced to get those things from the world, wherever we can get them. I also think that the people we meet, even if they don’t seem super-relevant at the time, deposit things in us that we carry forever. Sometimes a person we don’t realize is doing something for us ends up making a profound change in how our lives work.
In this case, I’m talking about a woman I haven’t seen in two decades, who I knew for a little over a year, who saw the world in a way I never could. And I, in kind, was an “evil” force in her life in the eyes of her family and church. This is oddly a motif in my young life, as churches didn’t seem to like Native thinking. It would have been easy for me to rage against those of the faith, to treat them as a few churches had treated me, to not give them a chance or to be inconsiderate. I’d been treated awful, and I could easily have used that as a justification to be cruel and judgmental in return.
I never set out to try to pull this girl away from her faith, mind you. It wasn’t something I wanted. I wouldn’t have wanted to “win” the battle with her closed-minded family and church. All I ever wanted for that girl, the only reason I was ever attracted to her, was that I wanted to see the spark of curiosity and free thinking I saw blossom. She was a good writer, and she was asking the sorts of questions an intelligent person asks. I knew that a long-term relationship could never work with me and someone who quoted Bible verses on the regular the way I quote movies and songs, but I also knew that I saw more in her than someone being led like a sheep through the life her church expected of her. When I met her, she felt being curious was bad because her church didn’t want her to question anything. She was… down in a hole that had nothing to do with faith and everything to do with manipulation.
She reminded me that not all people from a faith are like the worst people from that faith, a thing I needed so that I could continue to embrace the people around me without being constantly afraid/leery of their motivations. I’m cool with Jesus thanks to my time in that relationship. I’ve always argued that on some level we can’t control who we love, but once we love someone, we can’t generalize the people like them anymore. We put a face on the faceless.
So I needed to have her in my life, for a bit. And I recognize that.
At that time in my life, I had a hard time accepting that we don’t build relationships forever, but she was the case that concretized that for me. Knowing that any relationship of any sort has an expiration date is something an academic has to know.
It did my heart good this morning –all these years later– t0 see that I had an impact on her, too. It increased my faith in my belief that we all meet people and interact with them for a reason. When something goes badly, it can feel like it wasn’t rewarding. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever done anything other than annoy her family and friends and waste both her and my time. Turns out I had a role to play.
I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes those posters that super-basic people put on their walls are right.
Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile, because it happened.
Or chuckle because your cold medicine Westworlded a memory into something bizarre.
How bizarre.