"I'll probably never see you again."

I really need to stop eating pizza before going to bed.

Last night -- or, more accurately, this early morning -- I had one of the most vivid and involving dreams I've had in a while. For the past half-year I've dreamt very little, if at all, but this dream awoke something that I generally repress. No, not my latent homosexuality, something else.

I came to Korea to work shortly after graduating university, and doing so left behind a lot of good friends. At the time most of us were regularly out of touch, because we were all either finishing school or had moved away, and it was hard to call or write everyone at the time to say farewell. This is something I regret terribly, because while I have made a lot of friends over the years, I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twenty-two. Jesus, does anyone?

Five years later, there are some friends I haven't heard from or, for my part, bothered trying to contact. One in particular is Mike M, a friend whom I first met when I was in eighth grade and became close friends with in the ninth. Though we were never best friends (we didn't live close enough together I suppose) he is one of the most amiable and effortlessly witty guys I've ever known.

We used to have contests to see who could come up with the silliest or most grating word to the human ear. I think I won with fecund, but it's been a long time, and my memory tends to favor myself.

Why so girlishly lachrymose?

Yesterday I went out for dinner with a colleague, and we brought our wives and children. During our meal my acquaintance's eight year-old daughter, who can speak English remarkably well, asked me, unsolicited, which dog I think is the most beautiful. This led to me expounding (rather drunkenly, I'll admit) on the virtues of pets, until at last I recalled from the cobwebs of memory my friend Mike and the Irish setter he had.

This dog was, to me at the time, a giraffe with a hunch. It was so mammoth (for a dog) that it often wore a bandage on its long tail from slapping it against the narrow hallways of the Cape Cod-style house.

When our respective families were parting ways, my colleague's daughter asked "doesn't it make you sad that you'll never see that dog ever again?"

Man, did that hit a soft spot.

And so last night I dreamt that I was at my old friend's house, both of us teenagers again, his parents away. As bored teenagers are wont to do when confronted with this limited freedom, we took a swim, heisted some of his old man's beers from the fridge, and ordered pizza. Afterwards we shot the breeze, sitting on his front porch, smoking.

That is until a gangland shootout suddenly occured and I had to take cover underneath his parents' Acura Integra from a shower of uzi fire. A news crew was soon there, and, this being a dream, I could hear the newscaster's report of what was happening live. The camera panned to a white sedan, and a reporter identified it as belonging to a police informant. Apparently the gunmen could also hear what the newscaster was saying, because afterward they all turned their weapons on the car and shot the driver, who had run out into the street, dead.

I awoke soon after. I know the dream itself means nothing, but it brought back memories of a friend whom I hadn't given a spare thought about in nearly 3 years. The last time I heard from him was in the fall of 2002 when I was back in Canada on the eve of my wedding. He called a half hour before the family and I returned home after the rehearsal, and when I called back his father told me he had just left. Since then, nothing.

I woke up from my dream with a sensation of profound...I don't know. Lonliness? Not quite. Is there a single word for fond-yet-regretful reminiscence?

Guilt maybe?




As an addendum, today I took a nap and dreamt I had to evacuate the wife and daughter from a labrynthine movie theater which had caught fire. I hope this doesn't portend any peninsular strife.