Thursday, August 26, 2004
I swear everyone dreams for a reason
One night at camp this summer I had a very strange dream. I dreamed that there was this hot new trendy plastic surgery in which people were getting their eyes removed and replacing them with large plastic plain black shiny pupils, basically making everyone look like Power Puff Girls.
So in the dream I had the surgery. And then within a day later, I regretted it so much. My heart was broken. I wanted my green eyes back. I went to the surgeon who performed the operation, and he told me they didn't keep the old eyes, and they didn't have the technology to make me new ones. I couldn't see like I used to. I didn't look like I used to. I missed everything about my eyes that I had never even noticed affected my life.
I experience the strongest, most horrible pangs of regret I had ever felt. The dream haunted me for days. I kept trying to figure out what it meant. I didn't understand at first for obvious reasons: the strangeness of the whole thing, plus the fact that in my dream I was one of the first people to have the operation, and the idea of plastic surgery kind of grates on me. I don't think I'd ever do it. And I don't think of myself as a trendy person -- at least not the kind who does things so spontaneously just to do them first like that.
I had to interpret the dream, for my own sanity. I searched my past for a familiar association with the feeling of regret. I wanted to trace back to my earliest experiences of that kind of loss. I came up with this:
When I was about 5 years old, I had an Ewok. It was my favorite stuffed animal. Then, one miserable night, my sister got sick and threw up all over it -- and my Cabbage Patch doll. It happened right around the time we were getting ready to move and my mom was cleaning house. So when she asked me if I wanted to keep it or throw it away, I said throw it away. She asked me if I was sure. She said she could wash it, but I told her no, just throw it away. (I swear I have a point here and this story isn't about yack.)
A few years later we were getting ready to move again, this time out of state, from Illinois to Florida. My mom was going through what to take and leave behind, as we did many times, and we came to my Eeyore. I had a stuffed Eeyore, big enough for me to hug, just like the Ewok. And it had a Velcro tail that would fall off and you'd have to put it back on. Eeyore was my favorite stuffed animal. I think I chose to throw it away because I was sad about moving. Then I remember being in Florida, crying in my new bedroom because I was lonely and I missed Eeyore.
This is a lot less funny in writing than it was when I first realized it, but anyway, it was especially funny when I relayed these parallel epiphanies to Tom. I met Tom at camp. I called him the Silly Brit, mainly because he told crazy stories that made me laugh my ass off, and he was from England. He is the only person I've ever sat down and told the history of my love life, from first love to wherever the hell I am, six years later. We sat one night on the extra long pier with the views of the mountains I've spoken of so much, the ones my memory is trying to hold onto while at the same time hoping they'll slip away gracefully. I told Tom more about me in one breath than I'd probably ever told anyone so spontaneously, and he looked at me that night and said, "God. I could tell by you it would be complicated, but I had no idea it would be that complicated."
Tom told me that night I had to think more in black and white. I hardly listened because I've always sort of had a passion for gray. I like irony. I like inconsistencies. I think variety is the spice of life. I like confusion because in a way clarity sometimes seems like the end when it's only an illusion.
Tom always had answers. He said I need to be smarter about getting rid of things. He said I was right to get rid of the Ewok because it was no good anymore. He said I should've held onto the Eeyore because it was perfectly good.
On my last night off, before coming home, I sat on that pier again with Tom, or rather, I was sitting on it by myself listening to Cake, and he walked over with Haley, another counselor. We walked down to the dock and stared up at the stars. A tear rolled down my cheek and I said, "You know, Tom, you said a lot of sensible things to me that I didn't take so sensibly. Thank you."
One night at camp this summer I had a very strange dream. I dreamed that there was this hot new trendy plastic surgery in which people were getting their eyes removed and replacing them with large plastic plain black shiny pupils, basically making everyone look like Power Puff Girls.
So in the dream I had the surgery. And then within a day later, I regretted it so much. My heart was broken. I wanted my green eyes back. I went to the surgeon who performed the operation, and he told me they didn't keep the old eyes, and they didn't have the technology to make me new ones. I couldn't see like I used to. I didn't look like I used to. I missed everything about my eyes that I had never even noticed affected my life.
I experience the strongest, most horrible pangs of regret I had ever felt. The dream haunted me for days. I kept trying to figure out what it meant. I didn't understand at first for obvious reasons: the strangeness of the whole thing, plus the fact that in my dream I was one of the first people to have the operation, and the idea of plastic surgery kind of grates on me. I don't think I'd ever do it. And I don't think of myself as a trendy person -- at least not the kind who does things so spontaneously just to do them first like that.
I had to interpret the dream, for my own sanity. I searched my past for a familiar association with the feeling of regret. I wanted to trace back to my earliest experiences of that kind of loss. I came up with this:
When I was about 5 years old, I had an Ewok. It was my favorite stuffed animal. Then, one miserable night, my sister got sick and threw up all over it -- and my Cabbage Patch doll. It happened right around the time we were getting ready to move and my mom was cleaning house. So when she asked me if I wanted to keep it or throw it away, I said throw it away. She asked me if I was sure. She said she could wash it, but I told her no, just throw it away. (I swear I have a point here and this story isn't about yack.)
A few years later we were getting ready to move again, this time out of state, from Illinois to Florida. My mom was going through what to take and leave behind, as we did many times, and we came to my Eeyore. I had a stuffed Eeyore, big enough for me to hug, just like the Ewok. And it had a Velcro tail that would fall off and you'd have to put it back on. Eeyore was my favorite stuffed animal. I think I chose to throw it away because I was sad about moving. Then I remember being in Florida, crying in my new bedroom because I was lonely and I missed Eeyore.
This is a lot less funny in writing than it was when I first realized it, but anyway, it was especially funny when I relayed these parallel epiphanies to Tom. I met Tom at camp. I called him the Silly Brit, mainly because he told crazy stories that made me laugh my ass off, and he was from England. He is the only person I've ever sat down and told the history of my love life, from first love to wherever the hell I am, six years later. We sat one night on the extra long pier with the views of the mountains I've spoken of so much, the ones my memory is trying to hold onto while at the same time hoping they'll slip away gracefully. I told Tom more about me in one breath than I'd probably ever told anyone so spontaneously, and he looked at me that night and said, "God. I could tell by you it would be complicated, but I had no idea it would be that complicated."
Tom told me that night I had to think more in black and white. I hardly listened because I've always sort of had a passion for gray. I like irony. I like inconsistencies. I think variety is the spice of life. I like confusion because in a way clarity sometimes seems like the end when it's only an illusion.
Tom always had answers. He said I need to be smarter about getting rid of things. He said I was right to get rid of the Ewok because it was no good anymore. He said I should've held onto the Eeyore because it was perfectly good.
On my last night off, before coming home, I sat on that pier again with Tom, or rather, I was sitting on it by myself listening to Cake, and he walked over with Haley, another counselor. We walked down to the dock and stared up at the stars. A tear rolled down my cheek and I said, "You know, Tom, you said a lot of sensible things to me that I didn't take so sensibly. Thank you."
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