Silent

I know I’m leaning hard on my now-distant friends since the move, and I don’t know if it’s by comparison or if it’s actually true, but they all seem so much busier now that I’m not. I admit it — I’m a little lonely and it strikes me that their lives are very full by comparison.

Take N for instance. After many cross-country marathon phone calls during which we discussed everything from his marriage to my many hidden neuroses just to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel, suddenly he’s a ghost.  I’ve left four messages over the past week and managed to wake him up late one night, but he hasn’t returned a single call. Come to think of it, it’s been pretty much me calling him for a month now, maybe longer. After I left the last message Saturday morning, I swore I would not call him again. He was obviously very busy or didn’t want to talk, and although I’m not up on international law, I’m pretty sure trans-continental stalking is frowned upon as much as other kinds.

That was before the weird nightmare I had about him. There I was in the middle of the dream world’s answer to leftovers – a disorienting mix of thoughts overflowing from day’s experiences – when suddenly I was running on a beach, screaming his name at the ocean in a state of total fucking panic. I had a very distinct sense – and I realize how desperate this sounds – that he was slipping away, farther and farther. Then suddenly there’s a woman in a windbreaker kneeling in the sand giving me a big, shiny butcher knife, the local cops are sort of laughing at me, and the town is running a series of stories about an old woman running loose on the beach, crazy from the fallout of an ancient, failed romance. I saw the newspaper in the dream; it actually said ‘failed romance’. God, I hope I’m not in any way prophetic.

Like I said, most of the dream I can trace back to the detritus of a sensory-crowded day, and I can even probably chalk up the ‘disappearing N’ part to the fact that he’s pretty much disappeared for the past week.

But it was 4 AM here and 6 PM there, so I called him anyway. Predictably, he didn’t answer. This time, I didn’t leave a message.