DREAM #.070310: "GANG OF ONE"

   In my dream, I'm at an airport of some kind. It's generically vast and busy, but its details most clearly evoke the San Francisco International airport. All gleaming white. Ceilings that are stratospheres unto themselves. I'm wearing the long black overcoat I used to wear almost every single day, back in my senior year of high school. It's splattered, here and there, with blotches of red and yellow paint. It smells like paint, like an art class or something. My hair is tousled and greased into the kind of perfect haircut I only get in dreams. I'm holding a big black notebook. I'm not sure if I'm here to meet somebody or to see somebody off. I'm definitely not here to travel. I feel as if I'm more rooted and native to whatever territory this airport is in than anyone else in the complex, like I'm the mayor or the village wise man or something and I've been whatever I am my whole life. It's understood.

       I start to spot people I know. Old friends and new friends. Lovers and enemies. Family members I never see. They're all arriving (or have arrived ) separately, but I'm somehow warmly greeting them individually, all at once. This is some kind of crossroads place. I introduce these figures (from the whole expanse of my wandering life) to each other. I introduce friends to other friends and they seem to hit it off, then flight attendants will bring them their beautiful future children and the whole family will be escorted through a departure gate, off to their new lives together. It's obvious that I'll never see them again, in any lasting way, and that's okay. People meet and connect and intertwine. It's that kind of world.

        Some friends form gangs, people from wildly different locations and periods in my life who I always knew would get along, finally meeting, falling in some kind of love, sometimes getting a family of their own from airport staff and then leaving for their future. Even my Symbiote gets introduced to the lover she'll have after she's done with me. He's young, but he looks like he has money, and like he adores her.

It stings, all of this stings, because I'm seeing everyone I've ever known, everyone I've ever felt ANYTHING for, and they're all saying good-bye. But I reconcile myself to the sting of it. Like it's something I've had to get used to, because of what I do, who I am, what I'm for. Everyone is on their way to some future, some heaven, some hell. I'm a creature of the crossroads, apparently. A custodian of this interstitial space.

       Eventually, the airport is emptied of its teeming people. In the process, I come to realize that EVERY crowd in the complex is made up of people I knew or have yet to know and the people they would come to know after meeting me. Even the staff is familiar. They slough their uniforms and exit through the departure gates, bound for points unknown. To me, at least. All the directories are blank. But I'm sure that every being I've encountered here is on their way to a more profound and complete engagement with life and the dynamic frictions and fusions of other lives. The surging, churning human tragicomedy. Powerful stuff, or so they tell me.

I'm definitely set apart from this whole process. For a moment, I feel above it all in some way. then I correct myself. I'm not above anything or anyone. My place is just to the left of all this life, right at the corner of everyone's eye until I disappear from view completely, or they do. After hours (and, yet, a mere moment), the airport is empty except for me and some crows croaking intermittently in the rafters.

          It all seems sad, at first, this role of mine. All the hellos and good-byes. Even with my low impact effect on other beings, it's like I've done it all wrong, creating as much confusion and suffering as I have delight and enlightenment. Alone with the crows and my notebook, I feel like the worst conductor this crossroads has ever had. But I know I'm the ONLY conductor this crossroads has ever had, so I'm also the best. And I never had a choice. It's like every self-image I've had that connected me with other people has been a vain hallucination. I'm lonely at the crossroads, but I'm authentic. I miss everyone, almost as much as I missed being alone. I stop lying to myself and the crows careen and croak and swarm in celebration. I open my notebook and then I tell the only truth I know.