5/12/25

I had a dream last night that I was back in the neighborhood I grew up in. The streets were the same, as were the people, but all the houses were different — they were bigger, newer, and tackier. They didn't match the neighborhood, and each one was so big that it filled their lot completely, the houses bunched together so tightly that there was no way to squeeze between the edges of one and the next, cramped together into tightly compacted rows.

I walked through the neighborhood to where my grandparents' house used to be, but it had been torn down, and replaced with this large steel and glass building that had a homebuilder and a real estate agency inside. I entered, and they invited me in, telling me to look around at everything they could build or sell me. There were dozens of styles of houses and interiors, from very American styles to European ones, lavishly decorated to sparse, but I didn't seem interested in any of them. Instead I asked if they had anything from when I was a kid, anything from the old neighborhood, and they told me there was still a room in the basement that might have what I was looking for.

I went down a flight of stairs, which started off very sleek and modern like the rest of the building but ended up being old and wood-paneled and worn. At the bottom of the stairs was a hallway with three doors: one to the left and one to the right were both open, and looked like regular empty rooms, but the room in the middle's door was slightly closed, and I couldn't see inside. I pushed it open all the way and walked inside. The room was large, like a generously sized living room, and walls were painted dark blue. Pushed up against the far wall was a stack of furniture I remember from my childhood bedrooms — old dressers and nightstands and desks that I haven’t thought about in decades, all piled up on top of one another.

I walked over to one (an old brown and white desk I had towards the end of high school) and opened the drawer. Inside were various old papers (real, actual papers I remember from various points of my life), as well as photographs of me as a kid; some of the photos were with friends, some were with family, but all were torn in half horizontally. The top halves of the photos were there in a neat stack, but the bottoms were missing, and in that moment I was struck with this incredible sense of loss, realizing that those photos were damaged and gone, and there was never any chance of finding the completed images ever again. I started to gather up the photos and the paper, scooping them into my arms, but people started to file into the room and began ruffling through the other drawers, taking items and pages from them that I hadn’t looked at yet, stuffing them into their pockets or throwing them away while I tried to stop them, saying, ‘Please, I haven’t looked through those drawers yet, I don’t know what you’re throwing away, at least let me see what was saved here before you get rid of it,’ but there were too many people and too much going on, so nobody listened to me.

I woke up soon after filled with a strange melancholy for the things I lost that I didn’t know I had lost, things that never occurred to me but that might have been important. I rolled over and took my phone off the charger; there was still a couple hours before I needed to be up for the day.

I put my phone back down and went back to sleep.