The nightmare was not prophetic as far as I could tell, but it was traumatically realistic enough that upon waking, I knew my day was pretty much ruined. In the dream, this guy…
Oh. Wait. I should tell you about the guy. Whom we’re just going to call Guy, because I do not have the wherewithal to give him a name.
For about two years, Guy and I had an intimate friendship, the details of which we agreed not to bring to the attention of our mutual acquaintances. We didn’t meet up very often — once every other month or so — but our encounters were equal parts passion and affection, and I always looked forward to the next (usually promised but rarely pre-scheduled) tryst.
Over time, though, I picked up on a pattern. Guy would call out of the blue and suggest we get together, and when I accepted, he’d be like, “Great! So listen, I need a favor…” And more and more often, once the favor was granted, any plans we’d made would get cancelled. (“Oh, no, something’s unexpectedly come up. Again.”) The last time we were supposed to see each other, he called an hour beforehand to let me know that arrangements had changed: Instead of coming to my place, he was on his way to the suburbs to spend his weekend with someone else. Who, apropos of nothing, had offered to take him to dinner and loan him a few bucks.
I spent about three days after that wallowing in devastation, then announced to myself, “Fuck this noise,” and did my very best to put him out of my mind and pretend we’d never met. But even though I haven’t seen Guy in close to a year, bits of him are apparently still embedded in my subconscious, which happily provided a whole hallucinogenic narrative to thoroughly demolish last evening’s sleep.
In the dream, I was in Alaska (your guess is as good as mine), where Guy and I were going to rendezvous. However, I learned somehow that Guy had opted instead to go adventuring with a group of other friends. And while I attempted to process yet another of his abandonments, those same friends appeared at the door (of my hotel room, I think).
”Guy’s dead,” one of them said, without sentiment. And then he handed me a box of ashes, which I promptly fumbled and spilled.
At the bottom of the box was a jumble of charred bone slivers. One of them was shaped like a comma, and I carefully shook it loose from the rest and thought, “This is all I’m keeping.”
At which point I woke up and was like, “Welp. Let’s get ready for work and go take this mood out on some customers.”
Fortunately for my overall well-being, the first person to walk into the store was Sarah, clutching a canary yellow cardboard box.
”I know your birthday isn’t until September,” she said, grinning. “But I found something perfect for you, and my options were either give it to you now, or put it in the closet where I keep birthday presents and forget about it for 15 months. So here you go!”
Momentarily setting my woes aside, I opened the package, and… holy Mu Chao, y’all. Sarah was correct.
I thanked Sarah profusely, and my temperament remained upbeat for most of the afternoon. Right up until one of my employees came in for his shift and was like, “Ugh, I slept awfully last night.” And I was like, “Yeah, me, too…” at which point memories of the dream came roiling back in full force. I spent the rest of the workday vacillating between depression and wrath, finally settling on spartan resentment as my default mental state.
But as I was driving home and fighting post-Beryl traffic, a realization hit. At the end of Midsommar, Dani allows the Hårga to sacrifice her jerk of a boyfriend by burning him alive in their seasonal temple, which culminates in her spiritual and emotional freedom. (At least, that’s what I got out of it; she also may have just legitimately gone crazy.) And here I was, with a miniature replica of said temple on my passenger seat, along with a tin of complimentary incense cones and images of fantasy cremains sliding around behind my eyes.
Maybe the dream was instructional rather than oracular: I certainly didn’t want Guy actually unalived, but what if I were to put my new incense burner to analogous use and incinerate him out of my psyche? It felt workable, if not a little out there. Then again, Chaos Magic leans heavily into pop culture, so reworking the Internet’s favorite Good For Her moment into an act of liberational witchcraft wouldn’t go against any principles.
Plus the whole operation gave off a whiff of Discordianism, like, “You snub me, I trash your wedding. Fair is fair.” In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if Eris, knowing that Sarah was going to visit, had planted the dream in my head — I mean, she’d certainly found weirder ways to communicate in the past.
So that’s what I was mulling over as I wandered into the grocery store down the street from my apartment to figure out something for dinner. This particular store has an inexplicable rack of Christian-themed self-help and daily affirmation books next to the restrooms, which happened to land in my line of sight as I rounded a corner, and confirmation smacked me in the face so hard that I had no choice but to pull out my phone and record it for posterity.
The little temple is currently sitting on my altar, with mildly pungent smoke wafting peacefully from its tiny window and doorway. Whether or not the spell will succeed remains to be seen: Wounds only heal overnight in the movies, and the vestiges of the dream — coupled with memories of Guy in general — are still casting shade on my outlook. But I took some kind of action, and that feels a lot healthier than passively waiting for the pain to show itself out.
And even if freedom isn’t immediately revealed, I still have the temple: a thoughtful gift from a lifelong friend. And gentle evidence that the people in my life who truly care about me vastly outnumber the scant Guys who don’t.
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