The dream

I saw her in a dream after a really long time. At least in a dream that I remembered the next day. I’ve wanted to see her so badly in my dreams but there have been mornings that I’ve awakened, feeling like I needed to remember something but I couldn’t.

It was a strange dream, meshing weird reality with dreamlike occurrences. I recently joined a WhatsApp group of my old school mates. One of them reached out and left a voicemail about how sorry she was to hear about my mom. So the first part of the dream, I walk into an event and I see this girl. She is sitting with a picture of her late father. It’s Christmas Day. I think of my mother on Christmas Day. How she loved eating those plum cakes.

I spend the day at this event and I meet other people none of which I remember. But as I’m leaving the event I can’t find my phone. I eventually locate it in a bag. And while leaving I get a call from my mom.

She asks me when I’m coming home. How she had waited all day for me. I am racked with guilt that I was always feeling when I spent too much time outside. She begins to cry. She says she made all this food for me. I see a friend walking by that I haven’t met in years. I cup the phone and tell her, I can’t talk now it’s my mother and she’s crying on the phone.

I turn back to her. None of this conversation has words. It’s as if it’s communicated wordlessly. I can’t recall a single word that was said. Yet the conversation with her happened. And here’s the eerie part.

I knew she was dead.

Even though it was a dream, I was aware of the reality that she was dead. I asked her if she had eaten. Like I normally would. She tearfully said, she couldn’t eat the things she had made. As if they’d make her ill. She said that Baba would eat but she couldn’t. I walked outside and the girl who was sitting with her late fathers picture was waiting for me. I told her I had to get home soon to my mother. She was waiting for me. And that’s it, the dream ended.

These last few months and weeks have been hard. I’ve struggled with many of the things in my life. I’ve struggled with making sense of all the changes and how I need to face them. I’ve sought her out but to no avail. People say, talk to her, she will talk back. That hasn’t happened. Yet she spoke to me in this dream. Evoking that old sense of guilt and grief, that somehow I wasn’t there for her while she was waiting for me somewhere, while I was out. That even now somewhere she had made me dinner and was waiting.