A few nights ago I had a very emotional dream. A friend and I were in this room with a bunch of other people, though I didn’t recognize anyone else there. There was a balcony that looped around the perimeter of the room, with people all looking down at her, sitting in this chair on the ground level, in the very center of the space. I had to push through the crowd to get to her.
Once I got to her, she had either just died, or was in the process of dying. I kneeled on the floor and held onto my friend’s waist, hugging her, refusing to let go or surrender, just sobbing into her body. Her family wasn’t present, and I wasn’t sure if I should be the one to relay the news. I felt I needed to be with her sisters, and to just be with the people who really knew her. I went over, and her family understood. Her sisters adopted and enveloped me into their fold.
I woke up and texted my dream to this friend. The overwhelming sense of sadness was palpable; there must have been some kind of bat-signal. She was grateful for my checking in, and said that the day prior was one of her worst days in a long while. She described this huge sense of grief, a loss of self looming over her. The past year, she invested a great deal of energy toward shaping her life into something that she was proud of and excited about, diving head-first into several unknown challenges in the pursuit for more fully exploring long-held curiosities and passions.
Despite being terrified to leave a stable position without anything else lined up, she quit an awful job without a glance behind, and quickly found an internship with The Innocence Project, who brings justice to wrongly incarcerated people. She started learning dance, and quickly progressed through lessons, to being on a couple of bachata teams, to teaching classes in the studio and helping host events. All of these giant leaps and all of this unmistakeable bravery. Her recent actions and decisions have been incredibly inspiring, a big fuck you in the face of fear.
With the pandemic, all of these opportunities for growth were been ripped away. She found herself once again cramped in a much too-small a space of her family home, with no escape nor outlet. I talked about my experience mourning my own loss of self that had slowly developed over this past year and a half. I allowed my job and commute to rob my very essence and the deeper joy that resides within me, to steal my precious time and energy, in exchange for a few bucks and additional skills on the resume. I too became unrecognizable from the self I once was and desired to be. And just as I was just starting to come back into myself, to venture out to events and delve into the passions I had abandoned for far too long already, we were were all shut in.
In the past three or so years, I feel that this friend and I have been taking turns inspiring one another, learning from and influencing each other on a profound level. While geographically apart at this time, I am so very grateful for this friendship and believe that we will continue to support and stand by one another for many years to come.
Crescent Phrasing 