Me, a little kid in a bathing suit sitting in a car with my brothers and two or three of their friends. As we go down the road with a storm raging outside, one of my brothers jokes, "I guess this is our 20% chance!" Apparently the weatherman said there was just a 20% chance of showers that day, but I didn't know what "percent" meant. So my brothers & their friends explained it to me.
I don't know if that's really what the moment was like. I have a good memory, but it's never been perfect and that summer day was many years ago. But anytime I hear that there's a 20% chance of rain, that car ride comes to mind.
Years later, I'm in my early 20s at a party hosted by a college friend and his housemates. I'm there with another friend, one who often says to me that she doesn't want attention and yet attracts notice everywhere she goes. People are drawn to her like clichés to a flame while I stand there with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and marvel.
A few years after that, my friend who held the party is talking to someone else about me. "You met her once--she was at that party, with her friend -----" he says, and then he goes on to describe my friend who he's sure would be remembered. The person he is talking to says that oh, of course he remembers me, but who was this other person? He can't remember her at all. One of the most noticeable people in the room isn't even a footnote in memory.
That woman is the one who showed up in my dream last night. She was a bit of a cipher there, a nonentity in a way she never managed to be in the time that I knew her. How well do I remember her now? Somewhere around I've got samples of her writing. I wonder if, when I find them, I will recognize her at all.
"She genuinely wants to be honest, but reality keeps getting in the way." From what I remember of her, that fits. She did not lie. I'm sure of that. The problem was that whatever she felt and thought at the moment was, she believed, what had always been. You could have a debate with her, perhaps, and finally convince her of a point. If you were the kind of person who gloats over minor victories, you might say, "Ha! I knew I could bring you around to my way of thinking!"
At that point, she would look at you quizzically. "What do you mean?" she'd ask. "I've always believed that. I thought that way even when I was small." And you would not be able to convince her that what she had said five minutes before was what she had said five minutes before.
When I first got to know her, talking to her wasn't so confusing. Her reality was stable enough that she could tolerate and acknowledge deviations. She was living the way she wanted, on the path toward the kind of life she thought was her destiny. A few years later, though, things had fallen apart, with her having failed too many classes, having too many relationship problems, and finally holding tightly to the idea that she had never changed, that the world and all her friends had betrayed her. If anyone said that they remembered something differently, they were a liar and had always been a liar. And so she ended up with the firm belief that what she felt now was the way things had always been, and she could not remember a time when anything was any different.
At least, that's how I remember her today.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}