There’s this girl I used to know. Or did I?
It’s getting harder for me to distinguish my dream life from my past life. I’m fifty now, and much of what’s behind me, especially memories of the distant past, feels unreal. She came to me in my dreams, this girl I used to know or didn’t know. She came to me in my dreams until I started writing about her. One morning, after dreaming about her, I took notes about the dream, hoping it would loosen at least one non-dream memory, but all that this accomplished was closing that part of my subconscious where I would go at night, while I slept, to see her once again.
She lived, if she lived, with her parents in a western Chicago suburb. Not Oak Park, but maybe Berwyn. In my dreams, she lives east of Harlem Avenue in a ranch house that sits on a corner. It’s not a large ranch house, but it’s nicer than any place I had lived growing up. But maybe she lived west of Harlem. Or maybe she never lived at all.
There’s nothing especially notable about this girl. I can never fully bring her into focus, and the harder I try, the more difficult remembering her becomes. It’s like trying to imagine infinity. At a certain point your brain shuts down, as though your unconscious mind understands the limitations of your imagination before your conscious mind does, and then you have to start trying to remember all over again.
She had brown hair. She was 5’7”, 5’8”. She was neither thin nor heavy. She was neither unattractive nor notably attractive. I met her while I was in high school. Or college. Or maybe not at all. And yet I was in love with her. I could feel the intensity of that love each time I woke up from dreaming about her. I spent one summer visiting her, or so my dreams would suggest. I would drive all the way to her house in Berwyn or wherever. In one of my dreams – and this I know with certainty didn’t happen – I drove there many years later, knocked on the door, but she didn’t recognize me after she had opened the door. I had to remind her who I was. She was still living at home with her parents – parents I have no memory of ever having met. Once she remembered who I was, she hugged me hard. It was as though she had been having dreams of me, too; dreams of a vague boy from her past, and she hadn’t been able to tell if they had been real or not until I was standing there in front of her, many years later. But this part, sadly, is a dream. A recent dream. The one that prompted me to begin writing about her. But here’s another possibility: that this dream was the only dream I’d ever had of her, and that the notion that I had been having this recurring dream about her for years was an idea that had been planted in this single dream – a memory inside of a dream of something that had never actually happened. I honestly don’t know. I had never written about those prior dreams, so I have no proof that I’d ever had them. And maybe – just maybe – the dream-memory was powerful enough to feel like an actual memory.
I have no memories of what we might ever have talked about. I have no memory of where she had gone to college or how we might have met. All of these things would lead a reasonable person to believe that I had conjured this girl out of nothing. But one day after my second divorce, while packing up my house to move nine hundred miles away, I found a box full of letters. The letters were mostly from girls I had once known, and inside the box I found a letter from a girl I have no memory of.
Her name is Erin, and the stationary is a notepad with Eastern Illinois University written in looping font across the top. The letter is addressed to my dorm room at Southern Illinois University and dated January 29, 1985. I have no memory of ever having met a girl named Erin, and I have no memory of having visited Eastern Illinois University or meeting a girl in Carbondale who went to Eastern. The letter begins as follows:
Dear John – no this not a “Dear John” letter.
How the heck are you!
Thanks for your letter it was “muy” (very) interesting, quite poetic, a little “off the wall”, but I liked it a lot anyways.
I’ll answer your questions now – with your permission of course…thank you.
I am fine – healthy – happy – living, breathing, sleeping, eating, you know – the usual.
Eastern is fine too – it is happy – eating – sleeping – I have a roommate this semester and fun neighbors – Debbie, the girl with the red hair that you met, is one of my neighbors.
The letter goes on, offering vague information about classes she’s taking and comparisons between the new semester and the previous one. Halfway through her letter, which was handwritten on both the front and back on two small sheets of stationary, she writes, “It’s kind of hard to answer your question, How How How etc. etc.? so I’ll leave that for the sequel to this letter.”
At one point in the letter, her neighbor with the red hair, whom I also don’t remember, writes in one of the corners: “John. Remember me. I’m Debbie but names aren’t important. I hope everything is going well. Hope to see or hear from you soon. Take Care. Debbie.”
Names are apparently not important. Debbie has no last name. Erin has no last name, not even on the envelope, where she is simply Erin and a dorm room address, school, city, state, and zip code.
Erin is not the girl from the recurring dream. But I introduce Erin as evidence of someone who existed about whom I remember absolutely nothing. There are no other letters from her in my cardboard box. I did not, to the best of my memory, take up her offer to visit her and stay in her dorm. And if, before finding this letter, I’d had a dream with her in it, which is entirely possible because she surely exists in my unconscious mind, I would have wondered the same questions. Is she real? Did we ever actually meet? And if we had met, where and when did we meet? Clearly, I thought enough about Erin to write a letter to her, and she had thought enough about me to write back. So why has my memory of her entirely vanished? Why do I remember absolutely nothing about her at all?
Several years ago now, not long after setting up my Facebook account, I began searching for old friends, people who’d disappeared entirely from my life, most of whom I’d had no intention of sending friend requests to. I only wanted to see what had become of them; I wanted to satisfy my curiosity. Except for Steve.
Steve had been my best friend my sophomore year of college. I had transferred from Illinois State University to Southern Illinois University, and I knew no one at my new school. Steve was in my creative writing class, the first creative writing class I had ever taken, and after class one day, he invited me to a party at the house he lived in with several other guys.
Steve lived in a house called the Pancake House, named so because cooked pancakes that had been left out to harden would get hammered to a wall and hang there for months like pinwheels. At his party, one of his roommates – a gloomy older student who wore a long, black trench coat – bitched about the uselessness of creative writing classes. Steve and I stood at the bar in the living room and argued politics. It was a good-natured argument in a way that such arguments would never be good-natured now. After we argued, we hung out on his porch, drank until daybreak, occasionally prank phone-calling professors we didn’t like.
There were many parties that year, and when there weren’t parties at his house, Steve and I would find other parties. There was never a shortage of parties in Carbondale. It was rare for a day to go by that we weren’t headed somewhere together. We frequently hung out with the same two girls whose names I no longer remember, and though Steve and I both liked the same girl and she seemed to like both of us equally, I would always end up hanging with the other girl by night’s end.
Over winter break, I drove up to Steve’s parent’s north side Chicago house, which turned out to be a mansion with a large stone security fence surrounding it. Steve met me at the gate. I didn’t say anything, but I suspected Steve would have been embarrassed introducing me to his parents. I wore shabby clothes. I drove a shitty car. But I said nothing about this. As spring semester wore on, we made plans to room together our junior year. We had even picked out an apartment complex, but that summer when I called his home to talk to him about our plans, I was told he had moved to Japan for the year. I’d had no idea that he had been thinking about moving to Japan. And then, like that, I never heard from Steve again. That was it.
Twenty years later, I contacted Steve through Facebook. I mentioned the creative writing class, the Pancake House, the prank phone calls. He wrote back to say that although I had an amazing memory, that although I had conjured a number of things he had forgotten, he had no idea who I was. I wrote again, this time with details about the two girls we had spent time with, about one particularly weird prank phone call that involved singing and guitar playing, and about the time that he and his roommates had had sand was poured into his house for a beach party. In his reply, he was amused by my anecdotes, but no: He still didn’t remember me. At this point, I wasn’t sure how much to push it. How could someone whom I had considered my best friend for the better part of a year have absolutely no memory of me? What happens when you cease to exist in someone’s consciousness? And so I reminded him of how we were supposed to have been roommates but how he had gone to Japan instead. Steve wrote back, “Look, I really don’t remember you, and I don’t know what you want from me.”
How could I explain to him what I wanted? I didn’t want confirmation that all of these things had happened because I knew that they had. I didn’t want confirmation that they had not been figments of my imagination because I knew that I was sane, that I had not blurred reality with fantasy. What I had wanted was to conjure up myself, like a genie materializing out of smoke, for someone who had allowed me to disintegrate from his memory. How was it possible not to remember the person with whom he had spent a good deal of that year?
Unnerved by this episode more than I probably should have been, I eventually unfriended Steve and let it go. But had I ever appeared in one of Steve’s dreams, he would have assumed, should he have remembered the dream upon waking, that I was a fictional character. He would not even have entertained the possibility of my existence. For Steve, I would have been something he had created out of nothing.
As for my dream girl, she is gone now. I can already hear someone say, But now that you’ve written about her, she’ll always be with you, but this isn’t the case. She is disappearing. She is disappearing as Erin had disappeared or as I had disappeared for Steve. But in the dreams, especially the dream in which I returned many years later to find her still living in her parents’ house, I felt as though our timing had at long last synched up so that we could start what we had never been able to start before. I was in love, in other words. I was in love in a way that I had rarely ever been in love, even with women with whom I should have been in love but couldn’t, for one reason or another, admit the truth: that I wasn’t in love. Or at least not in love in this way. But in the end, this woman, this girl ostensibly from my past, is a mystery and will likely remain a mystery. But here’s what I know for certain. I miss her. I miss her deeply, whoever she was, whether she was real or not. Even if she never existed, even if I had conjured her from some wellspring of longing, the emotion is real. And maybe that’s what this dream is about. It’s not about the girl I might have once known or the woman she might have become. It never was. It was about a feeling I must have once had for someone, before years of subsequent heartbreaks and anticipations of doom caused me to forget not just the feeling itself but the longing I once had for that feeling. What the dream was saying to me was this: Remember? Remember?
John McNally is author or editor of fifteen books, most recently a young adult novel, Lord of the Ralphs (2015), which was an adaptation of his novel The Book of Ralph. “Dream Girl” is from his next book, The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex: Memoir of a Fat Kid, to be published in 2017. His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in over a hundred publications, including One Teen Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Washington Post. He is Professor and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. A native of Chicago’s southwest suburb Burbank, John divides his time between Lafayette, Louisiana, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.