So I take Gabapentin every night before bed to help with the hip pain.
While I can’t say it does much for the pain, it does encourage very lucid dreams.
My dreams tend to have rotating people and locations. (At least the ones I can remember upon waking.)
One of the great unhappy things of my life is that I lost touch with my best friend in childhood when we were around 12-years-old.
We theoritically met on the first day of first grade, and my mother was friends with his mother from high school. (The neighborhood was basically an ethnic Polish diaspora enclave where everybody pretty much knew everybody else and their families.)
My parents had pulled me out of the local Polish Catholic school where everybody was just like me and put me into a private school on the other side of town.
To my parents, this was a good thing as I’d theoretically get a better education.
Of course, it was one of the single worst things they could ever do to me and the negative impact it had on me affects me to this very day.
I lost everyone being like me (lower middle class mostly blue collar Polish-American) and put me into a surrounding full of kids whose parents were upper middle class professional and very well off.
I became disconnected from my best friend and all those who were just like me.
It was traumatic beyond belief and caused me to create an illusionary world of lies around me to deal with all these kids who were utterly not like me at all. I lied about everything in my life to them to make it look like I was not one step above poor and so forth. It was my attempt at 12-years-old to deal with what was essentially a class situation.
Anyway, my best friend D*** and I shared so much in common. Our love of comics was and Star Wars and other science fiction/fantasy was intertwined at a core level.
You have to understand something too. We were pure Gen Xrs! During the summer, I’d get up early and bike to his house and we’d spend the entire day biking around, hitting the arcade inside the K-Mart, fuck around near a slaughterhouse, run through the drainage sewers under I-75, read comics, watch movies on Showtime, get yelled at by old Polish women because we were “up to no good”, etc. (NOTE: We did not do anything bad. Old Polish women yelled at every kid in the neighborhood. Some more than others.)
And then… all of that changed.
I’d see D*** occasionally, less and less so, because we were not in the same school anymore and things just changed.
By high school, I was more or less at a private all boys school while all the other kids I had grown up with went to the local public or Catholic high school in our neighborhood..
By the mid-to-late 80s, the neighborhood had started the downward slide from being a 100-year-old Polish enclave into a falling apart area, with people of my parents generation finally moving out to better areas.
I don’t know where D*** and his family moved. I don’t know when they moved.
And yet a day doesn’t go by when I don’t think of D*** and wonder where he is and what his life is like.
He seems to have zero social media presence. I’ve tried searching for the past 25 years and have never been able to track him down with any real sense of reliability.
Anyway, the lucid Gabapentin dreams often revolve around D*** and our childhood and what can best be described as fictional interpolation of what our friendship would have been liked if we’d never been separated.
But the thing is… my dreaming mind never really gives him a face. It is like I know deep down he would look nothing like he did at 12 and therefore, my dreams don’t even attempt to interpret what he looks like.
Last night I dreamt of him again, as I often do.
The loss of that childhood friendship is still like a massive hole inside of me.
I like to think that if that friendship had been able to continue throughout my life, especially our teen years, that I’d have been a much better person than I became.
That hole would not have been there these past 43 years.
Every time I listen to Arcade Fire’s perfect album The Suburbs I see myself and D*** in so many of the songs and lyrics.
Took a drive into the sprawl
To find the house where we used to stay in
Couldn’t read the number in the dark
You said let’s save it for another dayTook a drive into the sprawl
To find the places we used to play
It was the loneliest day of my life
You’re talking at me but I’m still far awayLet’s take a drive
Through the sprawl
Through these towns they built to change
Then you said, the emotions are dead
It’s no wonder that you feel so strangeCops shone their lights
On the reflectors of our bikes
Said, do you kids know what time it is?
Well sir, it’s the first time I’ve felt like something is mine
Like I have something to give
The last defender of the sprawl
Said, well where do you kids live?
Well sir, if you only knew
What the answer is worth
Been searching every corner
Of the earthSprawl I (Flatland), Arcade Fire (2010)
Wherever you are D***… know that you are never far from my waking or sleeping mind.