The Psychic Intimacy of Never Talking Again

i think i might be psychic, I text my psychic friend. Rather, those are the words I use to conclude a wall of rambling and recollection about Dreams and People and Situations, written with eyes-just-barely-open. Half an hour later and slightly more awake, I also call her to repeat the same sentiment in an even less linear and more distraught manner. I am horrified at how clearly it’s all there: the signs so obvious, the symbolism so obvious, the feeling so thick and sickening. Of course you are psychic, my friend says, because she is psychic and therefore assumes this to be an inherent human trait. But maybe you are also just really bothered by all of it, she adds, stretch and emphasis on the maybeeeee. A little smug, or I might be imagining it.

*

Right before this, in the dream, I am struggling to push open an old cathedral door. The door is heavy and dry and it creaks and creaks and creaks all the way down its trajectory, an awful sound slicing through the thick silence inside. I step in and with little surprise note that the nave is impossibly large: the ceiling impossibly tall, the walkway impossibly long, the architecture of my subconscious so often reaching the very limits of its axes, demanding submission. The air is thick with incense smoke and candlelight and I am struggling to see, trying to squint hard enough to spot the front pews and it is just not working, the room is just too damp and too dark, too tall and too long. 

I walk forward and forward and forward for what feels like ages, the sound of each step bouncing off the walls and ceiling (cave-like, I think), until a small figure comes into focus. It is someone I used to know once: this is immediately clear to me in the matter-of-fact way truths in dreams tend to be. I see her for the first time in a long time: a lifetime ago, we were on the cusp of an argument, I didn’t know what else to say to her so we just haven’t spoken in over a year. Her back is turned to me now, she might be praying or listening to organ music I myself cannot hear but without issue believe to be playing, and (of course) we are the only two people in this cathedral, in the entire urban plan of this dream, maybe, probably. 

I sit down a few rows behind her, quietly, cautiously, so as to not disturb her, and myself try to pray. I don’t believe in a higher power but neither does she, so I feel it might work exactly for this reason, and after what seems to me an impossibly long time of not-quite-prayer-not-quite-not (of course) she turns to face me. Her face is tinted orange and somber in the candlelight, I just can’t quite make out her expression, I am squinting hard and harder to see it and (of course) it remains just blurred enough for me not to be able to. I gather that it is my turn to speak, has been my turn to speak, actually, but I don’t know what to say and (of course) in this moment the dream dissolves, perfect cliché, obvious unfolding. 

*

I spend the whole morning on edge, as if I’d just seen a ghost (haunted, I say). A few days later, I think of her in a sweaty concert crowd: dim space, air dense and dewy, music we used to listen to together, many rooms ago. For a moment, I think of praying, think I might be praying.

Over the next few months, these dreams become an almost nightly occurrence: people and places strung together in no particular order, their absence their only commonality. Experience growing buried under layers of imagined present or reality erosion and just symbols underneath. For the first time, I feel legitimately compelled to start a dream journal: every morning, I feel around my bedside table for a notebook, then fill pages upon pages with details and drawings and interpretations, and every evening, my subconscious conjures up new material to be detailed and drawn and interpreted. In this team of two, we resurrect psychoanalytic principles. I flirt with Freud but can never quite commit: unconscious desires, projections abound, he is not my type but sometimes it just clicks; the logic behind the anger peels away anyway (easily, satisfyingly). 

Past midnight, I message my friends, invite them to join me in the intimate ritual of scratching at my old hurts. I send pictures of pages from my dream journal with all the bad drawings cropped out (the good ones conspicuously left in, of course), I text quotes from my most heart-wrenching lit-fic reads and caption them doesn’t this remind you of, I leaf through old diary entries scouring for the juiciest remember when-s. For nights on end, we itch to hit contempt but it proves aimless time and time again. We never unearth anything, not anything genuine, at least: whatever hatred I do manage to dig up always feels phony at best, xerox of a xerox (can only scrape something raw so many times). 

All the while my mother, my most reliable informant, keeps me up-to-date on all the latest developments. This is not something I have ever asked her to do, but she does the duty diligently all the same, and oftentimes with what one could call a slightly-disproportionate degree of commitment: I saw that ex-boyfriend of yours (author’s note: from seven years ago) on the street today, she says. I sometimes think that she might be a bit psychic too, with her exceptional talents for running into the main players of my most catastrophic teenage arguments or better yet, their parents, just as I am desperately trying to revive the once-burning desire to erase them from my life forever.

I admit to her once that I’ve been developing this fantasy about an old friend of mine, one where she, after years of intentional silence (the kind whose presence can fill entire rooms) reaches out to me first and apologizes. At this point, I have been dreaming of her regularly, the dreams leaving me almost more bothered by the sheer obviousness of my unconscious desires than by the desires themselves. I think of this often, never knowing where to put it, how to make it fit. 

For years, I have nursed my upsets, grown familiar with the what and the why and the where of my hurts; I am upset, I want an apology: easy to say and even easier to think so. Affirmations in abundance, from friends and from old diary entries and never anything of the sort to soothe the subconscious, several lives later: no one tells you what to do when you’re not upset anymore but to try to be upset again. No adequate instruction for when the craving for reconciliation starts growing from the dreamscape and into waking life, pressing against all the spaces once occupied by the hot and dormant rationale of pride.

My mother asks me quite bluntly: Why would she reach out to you first? And why would she, I think: I had shut all the doors to all apologies, now I have opened them but there is no one waiting outside anymore, of course not. How strange, to feel justified in your hurt but no longer in your anger, to want to forgive so badly but only on your own terms, to want and dream about impossible things without factoring in their impossibility. I had always envisioned the need for closure as something I could shrink with enough distance and pride and time, but all along I had only been feeding it, and feeding it well (here I think of Freud once more).

I remember an earlier conversation with my mother and in fact, countless ones like it: I am crying in the middle of the living room (quite dramatically, the whole family there), I am so offended that I don't know if I can ever weep it out, I feel discarded in a particularly adolescent way. I’ve tried everything, I say and it is true and it is not; either way, my closest friends have said cold things or they have said scalding things or they have left or they have changed, and I have been left time and time again, not knowing what to do but to pull away. 

My mother listens to me ramble and repeat myself endlessly, she lets me cry (and cry and cry). She agrees that I am right to be angry or sad, but she also always says, almost stops herself but always says, that friendship is something too precious to let go of. I want her to say something else, to leave that part out, I let old friends’ faces fade from memory nonetheless, almost out of spite: I let birthday wishes become increasingly sparse, I let feelings harden, try to make them harden to their core, try to believe that they have.

*

I am dropped into the middle of a lively conversation, one that has been going on for some time now: this is obvious, it’s just that the awareness had taken a while to catch up. The words coming out of my mouth and out of the other mouth are so amicable, so delicious, so filling, I know every single one before it is spoken and savor each all the same. The conversation is taking place in my room in Amsterdam, the dream-space more real than the real thing (crumpled comforter, messy desk, last sip of tea left cooling in my mug), all of which, taken together, makes the entire ordeal entirely impossible. In the dream, I make note of this impossibility, though I pay no further mind to it. 

The last I’d seen of her was in her doorway on a dreary December afternoon; the argument had cut through our conversation suddenly though not unexpectedly, an ugly gash revealing something even uglier underneath, I heard her raise her voice at me for the first time then and had caught myself raising my voice too. Ugly gash but a clean cut, too clean for my liking and so, because we have yet to talk about everything (everything-everything), we continue our years of unending conversation into my dreams, years of dreams, years of conversations, years of dream-conversations. 

In the vibrant unreality of my Amsterdam room (one that she never even got to see), in the absence of a more recent point of reference, she looks just as she did framed tall in that doorway and I have, of course, aged. When I first notice it, I just find it a bit absurd, but then I grow afraid: her face, the absence of reference, and the promise of next week. Same time, like clockwork, topics bleeding from one dream into the next with an alarming sense of continuity.

*

That morning I think that I am already distraught enough, reaching the limit of distraught, probably, but then a friend messages me a link to a news segment, asking me if it is who she thinks it is in the video. And it is who she thinks it is; I see her face for the first time in years (first new point of reference to contrast with the old), she is different than the dream but also the same. It bothers me immensely, what do I do with it, I don't know what to do with it. 

I send the video to all of my other friends, no caption, not knowing exactly what I want to say nor what I want them to reply. Then I spend the whole day writing and deleting a message (in bed, in class, in public transport, in bed again): i’ve been telling people that think i might be psychic and i keep dreaming of you and i am still so upset with you and i don't know how i am supposed to feel anymore. In the end, I draft what seems to be the least melodramatic version I can manage and, against every single one of my friends’ advice, hit send.

A reply arrives immediately, it's almost funny how quickly she opens my message, almost cheesy how quickly she messages back: i saw a book in the library today and thought of you, and in my dreams, so many conversations we never got to have. Simple and neutral in a way that leaves you braced for impact, no impact to come: yes, I have been thinking of you all along. After that, of course, reflection and apology, everything wraps up so uncomplicatedly that, narratively speaking, the ending seems utterly unfulfilling. She is the same but she is different, I am the same but I am different, and from that point forward, we weave back into each other's lives with ease. A conclusion so simple that, were this one of my most heart-wrenching lit-fic reads, I'd be the first to call it unrealistic.

*

After this, to make things cheesier, I decide to go on a true pilgrimage of reconciliation: I reach out to friends I haven’t seen in years, I send out texts that had been collecting dust in my notes for months. I have endless conversations expressing what I once used to call anger but is now more of a painful anger-residue, endless conversations analyzing the pain of absence. I receive endless apologies and surprisingly enough, find endless reasons to apologize myself. Most of all, I find myself reveling in the freshness of these old-new connections: some lasting, some only for a phone call or for however long it takes to get through a cup of coffee.

All the while, I think of my mother, about friendship being special and rare. I wonder if it had been that simple all along, or if it is precisely due to the distance and the time: these key ingredients making me reach the conclusions I end up reaching, experience the excitement I end up experiencing. It is one of those things that I find unfortunately resists all explanation other than age, no matter from which angle I analyze it. It almost makes me upset how impermanence sheds from every experience, how all I had to do was wait, how everything had been right there waiting for me to take it, for me to be ready to take it. No narrative more annoying or more true.

*

I dream of rather normal things now, like getting murdered in graphic and creative ways. I have also been told that it is not particularly psychic to dream of someone fifty times and then also see them in real life once (the fiftieth time), but on the other hand, is it not? Something magical about having someone on your mind, magical about not even knowing it at first, magical with how much difficulty we forget one another. I am full of anger and I am ready to let it go, I have changed and you have changed. I am haunted by the ghosts of friends past and the haunting is the magic, is the symbol, is the proof. Something psychic, at least a little psychic, let me have it: to think of someone while they are thinking of you.