I had this dream last night that there was a sort of high school - TopicsExpress

I had this dream last night that there was a sort of high school reunion and Jennifer Taylor, a former classmate, was suddenly there. We talked for some time and I was desperate to find out where she had been and what she had been doing all these years. Her demeanor was calm as we walked the spaces between the others who stood facing each other, catching up. I think there was a drink in my hand, but not hers. Definitely not in hers. We separated for a while but I tried not to lose track of her. As things were wrapping up I looked for her among the crowd but she had already slipped away. Somehow I knew this was going to happen but it was no less devastating. In some sense it was like she was never there for anybody but myself. I started to awake in the middle of the night and in a half state of sleep I felt my heart aching at what I had dreamt, that this person, who I have often thought about for the last 15 years of my life since I last saw her, was somehow, in reality, painfully missing. Absent. I considered getting up but I dared not. The blackness that surrounded me, the stars that I knew were just beyond the window but unseen, these kept me in a state of reverie where I knew that we are all part of a blessed community and that, like particle pairs, we remain essentially unseparated. But if in our faiblesse we find this not to be so, it is only that we have forgotten each other. Those that we grew up with are, perhaps, allowed a particular hold on us. I can tell you without hesitation why I still think about Jennifer. Even at a vulnerable time in her young life, at a stage of tenuous development, she felt no shame.