Monday, February 24, 2025

Sometimes I have fleeting, but very memorable and crazy high school memories...like the time my 10th grade English teacher read a scene from MacBeth right before a mouse ran across the room and Mrs. M hopped on top of the desk faster than I'd ever seen anyone move before. 

"Dude, I didn't know Lady Macbeth had a dog," commented one boy(perfectly serious and not seeing the mouse at all) in reference to our teacher saying "out damn spot."

Other equally strong, but far less funny and more devastating memories I seem to have made an entire career out of submerging. So perhaps that's why I've been having recurring dreams, going on decades, about something else that happened during high school that was far more alarming than a rogue mouse amidst Shakespeare.

I had one of the variations of the dream last night and as I always do after I wake from having it I wonder what is wrong with me that I still dream about something that happened so long ago and that the dreams can be so happy sad. 

One time, in one of my rare moments to try and put a stop to the dreams by actually acknowledging them, I wrote a hypothetical letter in my journal to try and find closure and apologize, in some kind of metaphysical way I suppose.

Reaching out to someone to apologize for overstepping boundaries years and years ago just seems selfish and wrong and possibly triggering so I knew I could never actually send anything. But I think when you realize you've wronged someone and you have no way to make up for that, it can haunt you for a long, long time, either in your real life or your dream, or both.

At that time in high school (and, really, still now) I was a very geeky unpopular girl who had a crush on another classmate. I didn't have any inappropriate longings or anything like that, but I deeply wanted a friendship I knew I could never have and it was up to me to recognize that fact and the kind and sensitive but still firm social cues I should have picked up from my classmate. Instead, though not by any intentions I was aware of, I became a huge pest and how can you ever apologize for something like that?


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