THE DREAM JOURNAL BY JUNE SHAUKAT
Pt 1 The Dream Collector
She had already been keeping the dream journal every night for about three years before we met. Part of her daily practice, she said. Shortly after meeting me, she told me she dreamt that we visited the ancient city of Petra together. We traversed al-Siq, the sandstone gorge, arm in arm, clothed in diaphanous white linen. The glowing eyes of jackals shone out of the darkness, but didn’t get too close. Then we stepped out of the canyon and the golden evening light blinded us for a moment and she woke before she saw saw al-Khazneh.
The intimacy of this revelation coming from someone who, at that point, I didn’t know too well, caught me off guard. We shared a class at the university, one of those required electives with a bullshit title like “The Evolution of the Sonnet Form in Contemporary Verse.” We had talked before, but this was the first time we had ever had a full conversation. I and everyone else thought of her as that concerningly thin quiet girl who always sat alone in the front row of the lecture hall. No one had shown up to the study session besides us as we pored over scansions of Hacker and Hayes at a boba shop.
“So. Do you write poetry at all?”
“Not really,” she laughed. “Poetry is kinda gay. It’s tryhard. I’m just in this class for the fine arts credit.”
I felt the need to fill the space. “Do you have any sort of creative outlets? I was going crazy a few years back and had to drop out for a bit and I honestly only got normal again after I started carrying a camera everywhere. Everyone needs an outlet.”
She thought for a moment, then responded: “I collect dreams.” Then she told me about the dream journal, and our meeting at Petra.
“Why Petra, do you think?” I asked.
“I dunno. I don’t analyze my dreams. Just keep track of them. I’m trying to achieve lucid dreaming,” she said while spooning the boba out of her drink and lining them up on the table.
“Why?”
“IDK.” She pronounced every letter of IDK out loud. “Just bored.”
That night, I dreamt about her. I thought about writing it down as soon as I woke up, but texted it to her instead.
>Dreamt we were at a hot springs in the desert and ppl were talking abt having to pee in it. So I got mad and dug a pee pit. But then when this guy we called "the intern" used it, it exploded hot wax and he died
>sorry if thats so weird
>dude haha
>I dreamt i was getting weed for you but I had to go thru Damascus (by train for some reason???) and the Syrian police arrested me ;-;
>omg
From that day onwards, we would send each other our dreams every morning. We also started hanging out outside of class, but never at restaurants. In fact, I never saw her eat anything in those days; occasionally she would take a furtive sip of a protein shake but I felt I didn’t know her well enough to tell her I was worried about her. No, we would meet in a park at night and share Merlot straight from the bottle, or meander the basement of Jujube’s Used Books for so long that no one noticed us shoplifting crystals. We were both in our last semester and skipped class almost every day until graduation.
And she would tell me everything. I learned that she was from the Valley and spoke fluent Spanish even though she was white. I learned her parents were separated, millennials having borne a teenage pregnancy. Her mom was a realtor who lived an hour away and sold her leathercraft at the Renfest as a side hustle. Her dad may or may not be in a cult; she hadn’t spoken to him in five years. She had been briefly green card married to a high school sweetheart from Nuevo Laredo and they were still friends on Pokémon Go. Content to listen, I never said much. I wondered how much she knew about my life.
Right before graduation, she called me, which was weird because she usually preferred to text, asking me to come over as soon as possible. Up until that point I still had never been inside her apartment; she would always say “it’s so messy” when I would drop her off. Inside was surprisingly clean but cluttered with tarot decks and old books with titles like “Astrology: A Feminist Perspective.” A literal palette of meal replacement shakes haunted one corner, with empty bottles overflowing the recycle bin. She was seated on the bare wood floor, in front of a map of the world and open books full of numerical charts around it. She was hammering nails through the map and directly into the floor, stretching colored yarn across the map in unintelligible lines.
“Do you remember my dream? The first time we met? In Petra? Look at my Venus ascendant line!” Her words were urgent, but she sounded excited. She gestured to some red yarn curled vaguely around the Levant.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“My astrocartography chart. I can calculate yours if you want! Anyway my numbers might be slightly off, due to the yarn being kinda thick, but I’m gonna fly to Aqaba tomorrow and just fuck around for a few months and see what I can find,” she recounted, breathlessly.
“Yeah and you’re definitely not gonna stand out, white girl. What?” I had always been patient through her mania but this was the first time I had actually snapped at her.
“I’ve already booked my flight. Come with me? I have the money for an extra ticket.”
I knew she had been making bank doing web dev since sophomore year. “I probably should have told you this earlier, but I accepted a Ph.D. offer here.”
“Oh.” She sounded more betrayed than I thought. My heart broke a little at the thought of not seeing her every day.
“You said you fly out tomorrow? You wanna go get fucked up and go stargazing?”
𓄎
>dreamed that i was trying to listen to vroom vroom by charli xcx on the plane but it wouldn’t come up in any searches on spotify and then i learned that she was considered an enemy of the state so her music was blocked here
>jesus christ
>how was your flight what was it like a billion hours or what
>it was lit
>I took a xanax and watched interstellar (^~^)
>did u dream about anything
>no lol
From then on, I kept my head down. I wasn’t lonely before her, I had friends, but I avoided them and put all my energy into my work. Some days, we would call each other and talk for hours, but started texting even more. I learned everything about her new life; every digital nomad partygirl in her hostel was a character I knew intimately even though they probably didn’t know I existed. I wondered how much she knew about my life. She started hopping from country to country based on transits or concordances or something like that — one day, she would be in Romania, and the next, Vietnam. When my sleep schedule wasn’t following her around the world, I had her time zones memorized, and we would leave each other dreams as we slept.
Soon after we both independently achieved lucidity, we started dreamsharing. Our first dream together was at Eleusis. I was walking through a field of golden wheat; the setting sun shone through the plants that were taller than me. All of the sudden the Telestyrion in all its splendour rose up in front of me. I entered; she was kneeling by the hearth on a red woven rug, offering deer ribs to the flame. She got up, turned to me, and smiled. “I’m so glad you finally made it,” she said.
From that moment on, we dreamshared every night.
> Dreamed that I went to Bolivia to visit you??? are you there rn?
>all I remember is there was still HEB there and I was gathering up tamales for dinner (guess wat I had for dinner irl) and the grocery checkout was in a greenhouse. The checkout guy sang a really pretty song while wrapping up raw fish (I felt bad about using single use plastic.) afterwards I asked what language it was and he was like “I just made it up”. Then you won grocery store karaoke by quoting The Office. Then the dream completely changed to just a scene from The Office but it was Pam and Jim denying being republicans
>haha yeah im in Bolivia rn <3 im with my fags rn tho
>lost my passie but its all good im going to the consulate tomozz
>omg are you good??
>yeah dw
>luis says hi
>hi luis :P
> ohhhh reminds me i dreamt we were at the club together and a really hardt echno song was on and I was like omg who is this? and U said “mitski” and i said i didn’t think she would sound like that and then this Scandi bitch lectured us for judging her based off her appearance
>ik
>I was there
>scandi bitch = Ada???
>yeah ada
>you forget I know everything about your life
>WHEN ARE YOU COMING TO VISIT BITCH <3
>SPRING BREAK IDK BTICH
>OK
>I GOT A LOT TODO FOR MY THESIS
>I NEED TO FUCKIGN START LOL
>my spring break mar 10-18 thoi
>ok lolllll ok miss up at 5am
>I couldn’t sleep
>are you in LOVE with me or smth
>love you babe go to bed!!!!!!!!!!
𓁿
>omfgfg
>ii fucked scandi girk
>*girl
>adaaaaa <4
>bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
One by one the characters of her Bolivia arc trickled in and out, but Ada stayed. After a while, they started living together, and then they left Bolivia and started hopping continents together. She started getting more and more reckless around Ada: taking laced shrooms at a cartel rave in the Darien gap, going on tours of warzones with the company that got that American guy killed in North Korea, and urbexing with Neo-Nazis (>ok soo he may be a nazi but hes so hot lol i think he might be gay tho ripp fr fr </3 ). After she got fired from her emails job, Ada paid for all her flights because she was some sort of edgy travel influencer and after a while, I heard more about their life through Ada’s Instagram posts than our dream journal.
𓉃
>WAHHHHHHH
>ada dumped me on matcha pichu
>omg girl are you ok
>no
>im just trying not to cry im in a hostel dorm I dont want to wake everyone up
>she dumped me when we got to the top we had to hike all the way down in silence
>this old yoga mama was showing me mudras
>what happened??
>idk she just said she want attracted to me anymore
> she says she doesnt love me anymore you know how swedes can be so blunt
>apparently i say i love you too much
>i honestly dont think shes bisexual even
>fml there r three more days of the hike down
>oh my god love im so sorry </3
>is it too early to say thats really funny timing
>girl fuck you
>i really really wish you were here okay
>sring break is next month ill try to come i promise im sorry its been so hard
>umm im flying to cairo next week the flights are already biooked were just gonna go and agree to live in different partd of town
>babe im sorry that is so hard
>I just need to get out of here
>call me ok??
𓊞
>btw I dreamed we watched a movie at the mall about your life where you were played by lea Seydoux
>ur skinnier than her tho LOL
>oh yea i remember that i was doing coke in the bathroom and u had to help me escape the cops
>olol
>i love u I feel so mch better I cant wait to see you FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!
Pt 2 Becoming the Lotus
>kung fu panda 3 was balls
>imagine wasting all that talent
>like the first two are so good bc they give the actors room to actually perform. this one was just edited like a fucking tiktok for cocomelon babies. the disrespect
>makes me kinda scared to see what they’re gonna do with the fourth one
>whatever
>anyway just landedddd
>cant wait to see you
I didn’t sleep at all for the whole fifteen hours. I felt drunk from being tired. I cried without knowing why in front of a muted screen playing Frozen in the terminal during my layover in Paris. She told me it was actually good that I wasn’t sleeping, that it would help with the jetlag (>so we can stay up all night clubbing >:^) we can go to the illegal gay bars the locals go to!!!). In the month since I had bought my ticket, she and Ada had packed everything up and moved, as promised, to different quarters of Cairo; then, against my counsel, drunkenly hooked up one night and started living together again.
She was unrecognizable. Her skin which had been sallow from her long days spent in front of computer screens had tanned to radiance. She even carried herself differently — now that she was no longer slouching, I noticed she was about an inch taller than me. Though she had filled out a little she was still so thin it made me sad and I still winced a little when I hugged her bony frame again.
“How was your flight!! I’m so happy you’re here!! Where were you last night?” Her voice had taken a new energy.
“Couldn’t sleep on the plane,” I said. “Sorry I couldn’t meet you there! What did you dream about?”
“It’s okayyy… really!” She hailed a cab and we started towards the Zamalek. “I dreamt I got cancelled on Tumblr LOL,” (she still pronounced every letter like she used to) “anyways I cannot wait for you to meet my fags.”
“No wonder you got cancelled…” I rested my head on her shoulder as we settled into the sparkling city. I didn’t tell her my dreams.
𓋏
We met up with Ada and Luis, the middle-aged bear they had followed to Cairo, at an upscale falafel shop. Luis was probably about 4’11”, had a strong New York accent, and reminded me of my therapist. And Ada was exactly how she had been described to me: coldly friendly in the sort of unapproachable way that Germanics are. She shook my hand as I went in for a hug.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said. I wondered how exactly I had been described to her.
“Same here!” I forced a smile. “Hopefully you can visit us back home in the states!”
Luis broke the silence by commenting on my film camera and alluding to how he had “worked in movies” before his divorce. After dinner, Ada peeled off because she had work in the morning, something that sounded dubiously legal concerning some Russian expats who paid solely in crypto. We then met up with her fags, as it were, in Luis’ rented penthouse overlooking the Nile. We drank smuggled wine from Lebanon with a gaggle of DL locals who didn’t really speak English but nonetheless knew where Texas was because obviously that’s where Beyoncé is from.
We left the party around midnight (“that was just the pregame,” Luis told me) and she lost her keys in the Uber. Too late to call Ada, she invited herself to my hotel room. We drunkenly climbed into bed together and she fell asleep instantly. I lay awake until I felt her hands around my waist, pulling me closer — she was still asleep as far as I could tell — my mind and heart raced but I turned away, pretended to be asleep, and gripped her hand in mine. I didn’t sleep at all that night.
𓂫
Over eggs and presumably halal bacon in the hotel lobby: “How would you feel about flying to Beirut today? I know you don’t have much time here but listennnn… I’m sorry but the club scene here is not it and it’s only an hour away.”
My cardamom coffee was doing a better job giving me a stomachache than waking me up. “Huh?” I sort of snapped. “I’m sorry but I’m already kind of broke from the flights.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, I’ve just been maxing out American credit cards, it’s not like I’m ever gonna go back there. Anywayyy my friend Damiana is gonna be in town for a few days and I reallyyyyy need you guys to meet-”
“Sorry, what?” I interrupted. “You’re not coming home?”
“Why should I? I’m happier here.” This was visibly true. “I’m chasing my Neptune line in Syria after I get bored here. Anyway anyway anyway I actually already bought the tickets… sorry!” I rolled my eyes. “And it’ll be just us. Ada’s got a meeting with the Russians.”
𓀑
Damiana was this Sorbonne-educated performance artist from Lebanon whose new project was performing skyclad rituals, including live animal sacrifice, in front of Israeli embassies worldwide. She went by only her first name, if that even was her real name, like Cher. No more than five feet tall, she somehow towered over our tall frames, and her gray-streaked hair complimented the keffiyeh around her neck. She was in Beirut for a few days to visit her mother, and met us at a touristy rooftop bar on the port.
“Damiana,” she introduced herself, putting the emphasis on the second-to-last syllable. I was caught off guard when she greeted us both with kisses on the cheek. “Enchanté.” She ordered a two hundred dollar bottle of Sauvignon Blanc for the table and proceeded to show us pictures on her phone of her upcoming exhibit in Paris: scenes from different left-wing revolutions recreated in a heavily-modded Grand Theft Auto V (“ohh my god, Damiana is always protesting something!”). I eventually coaxed out that they had hooked up a few times during the monthlong split with Ada, but Damiana didn’t tend to stay in one place for long.
“Damianaaaaa.” Wine-kissed, I summoned what I could of my college French classes: “tu penses qu’elle est un peu amoureux de moi nan?”
From the bar to a shitty gay club with neon lights and miniature party bottoms and pop music from 15 years ago, we drank shot after shot of arak until the room spun. I blinked and we were on a red-eye touching down in Cairo. “Jesus,” I said, a little louder than I would have liked. “I haven’t blacked out since freshman year.”
I switched my phone off airplane mode and a text from an unknown number read:
>On dirait que vous deux avez un peu dhistoire………….
>Bises <3 damiana
Along with a picture of us in bed, bodies intertwined, next to an unfamiliar calico kitten.
>btw je dirais rien à ada LOLLLL
We headed straight from the airport to meet Ada for a traditional Egyptian breakfast of stewed beans and pita — they had both suddenly become vegan after the ayahuasca animal spirits at the cartel rave asked them to please stop eating them. I was coming up on three days without a full night’s rest, and my vision was starting to get blurry. I tried to bring up the strong samovar tea, that we use something similar where my family is from to cure hangovers, but Ada kept interrupting me. I assumed it was just the language barrier, but it hurt all the same. When I saw them holding hands as we were leaving I started to get really agitated and called an Uber, which happened to be just a guy on a motorcycle that I had to hold onto the back of. On the way back, I started sobbing, and by the time I got to my hotel, my tears had dried from the wind on my face. I slept for the entire day and woke at sunset.
>sick baby deer
>i dreamt i was crying so hard that I woke up with wet eyes
>i had to quarantine a sick baby deer frm my cats so they wouldnt get sick too
>nooo :c
>did you get good rest???
>btw sorry i wasnt around that much today im just kind of burnt out
>ill see you tonite tho i promise!!!!! STD rave! <3
𓃗
“What the fuck is an STD rave?”
I found myself back in Luis’ penthouse, this time alone. She and Ada had yet to show up. “Ah… tonight my friends are throwing a rave at this underground STD clinic,” he laughed as he offered me a shot. “They have a dungeon and everything, you see. I don’t know why she called it that. Oh, Ada just texted me that they’re running late and will meet us there.”
In the cab I started to tear up as I watched the city go by. “Luis, Luis,” I bawled into his arms. “I think I’m falling for her, what should I do, what do I do…”
“I know she loves you and because of that I love you too. You’re both my daughters,” he said as he stroked my hair. Then he looked me straight in the eyes, surprisingly coldly, and said: “But Ada’s my friend too, and they’re happy now. Happier than she’s ever been, she said. And if you truly loved her back, you’d know not to fuck this up for her.”
I was taken aback. I shrunk away and felt like tumbling out of the taxi and into the Nile. We stopped in a dreary, quiet slum — the cab pulled right up to the door and we had to run inside because some tourists had gotten robbed in the neighborhood recently. Luis’ intensity in the taxi was gone as he greeted an army of squealing twinks. I watched a drag queen who made a pretty convincing Cher lip sync to Hanan’s “Ghariba” and didn’t know what to do with myself besides getting progressively drunker.
And then I saw her, dancing with a man who towered over her already tall frame, had a shaggy dyed-black mullet and a veganarchism tattoo. His face looked familiar but I couldn’t place it. Then I saw him grab her by the waist and pull her in for a kiss. I watched them make out for a couple of seconds before finding a staircase to the roof, where Ada was smoking with Luis. I didn’t smoke but silently accepted as she offered me a light, took one inhale, then vomited what little I had eaten that day. Ada held my hair away from my face. “Did you get a chance to meet Brett,” she asked. It was impossible to read tone in her voice.
“Brett, Brett the ANARCHIST,” I realized. Brett was this edgy militant vegan Twitch streamer I remembered her fawning over when we were in college together. It made sense that he would run in the same circles as Ada.
Then she and Brett came up the stairs and walked over to me and Ada and Luis. She introduced me and I said, “I’ve been wondering for years, how can you be militant if you’re a vegan, I thought you guyses whole thing was not killing anything ever ever forever,” then laughed so hard I dry heaved again.
“Yeah… she needs the taxi,” Ada said. “I’ll call one.”
My hotel room’s king-sized mattress reminded me I was sleeping alone this time. I dreamt I was in a coffin shaped box that was lit up on the inside and felt just like a very small spaceship with no windows. I kept getting thrown against the wall as if there were explosions all around it and outside people were trying to get in and they were yelling Joan of Arc’s name.
𓁲
I avoided her for most of the remaining week, and didn’t see her without Ada until my last day. I would spend the day blacking out on sabbaghieh and trauma dumping on expats in jazz speakeasies, wishing I had the cash to book an earlier flight home. The days flowed into each other like the waters of the Nile. Once, my mom called me, and I burst into tears.
We saved the Pyramids for my last day. The triple digit weather and interminable crowds of Australian tour groups precluded the requisite awe, but it felt weird to visit Egypt without seeing any of the sites that I had dreamt about for years. My vision wavered under the noontime sun, my hands became clammy, and I sat down under the meager shade of a date palm.
“I think I need to go home,” I said. “I feel drunk from the heat.”
She helped me to my feet and we hailed an auto-rickshaw with only room for two. I saw genuine concern in Ada’s face as she hugged me and thanked me for visiting and told me how glad she was to have finally met someone she had heard so much about before we headed off separately. On the way back to my hotel, we stopped at a souk for hibiscus mint tea to cool me off. I impulsively grabbed a bag of dried blue lotus blossoms to use up the last of my Egyptian pounds.
Above the shimmering haze and the setting sun, I packed my suitcase while she rolled a joint from the blue lotus petals. After I had finished packing, we smoked the lotus joint lying next to each other in bed.
“I’m really sorry that Ada was being so possessive,” she said suddenly, interrupting the Lana record she had put on. “She gets like that.”
“Possessive?” I blurted.
“You know what I mean, she kept making me late to everything. She says I act different around you. She says we move in the same way. She’s probably jealous that we’re more compatible. I mean astrologically speaking.”
“Why do you know that?”
“Baaaabe, you know I’ve had your chart saved in my phone from the first week we met,” she said.
We finished the joint in silence. I choked out: “I’m really sorry for being weird. And I’m sorry for avoiding you all week. I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful. It’s just that I think I’m falling in love with you.”
She looked at me for a moment, then pulled me close. My tears ran onto her shirt. “I’ve liked you for a long time,” she said. “On and off. Since we first met. But I didn’t want to ruin anything between us.” I nested my body close to hers and kissed her like she deserved to be kissed after all this time.
She let out a moan that turned into a laugh as I slid my hand into her underwear. “This is so crazy,” she said. “This is so incredible.”
“My girl,” I cooed into her ear. “Keep being a good girl for me.” Breathless, I ran my fingers up the back of her neck and made a fist, grabbing and pulling her hair. She trembled.
We floated over the city, laughing and crying, undressing and kissing each other’s lips, necks, décolletages like we would never see each other again. I climaxed when the sun set, and saw the lotus, borne from the alchemical union of earth and sky. We collapsed, exalted and shimmering, and melted into each others’ arms.
𓆸
I knew I didn’t have to text her this dream. I knew she had been there too. She had helped me finish packing, and we held each other in the taxi, knowing that nothing could ever be the same between us, that we would never again share the intimacy of knowing everything there is to know about another person. It would just be too complicated, but next time, she promised.
In every life.
As we explored each other in our previous life as temple priestesses hidden in the reeds and papyrus sedge. In the next, when we were two water lilies, roots and rhizomes intertwined for eternity. And as I wished things had gone this time, in my dream on the plane ride home.
I cried openly and clung onto her arm in the security line and watched her as she left the crowded lobby. She didn’t look back. It was the last time I saw her.
Pt. 3 Epilogue
>whens ur summer break
>i wanna come see youuuuuu
>girl your credit score
>i wanna visit my mom too sometimes i miss normal ok
>oh yeah me and bianca have brunch all the time we talk about you behind your back
>shut the fuck up
>we held hands last time
>oh my fucking god please stop flirting with my mom
>are we gonna talk about last nights dream?
>I went to the psychic yesterday
>she confirmed my theory that dreams are past and future lives
>I guess except that’s kind of a misnomer because I honestly thihk its all happening at the same time
>I miss you so much
I didn’t feel so bad right after getting back, mostly because for about a month we kept meeting in our dreams for nightly trysts. One night we were nuns having a furtive affair in a convent. In the next, we shared each other’s warmth as yak herders in a wintry yurt. I’d wake every morning aching with longing, masturbate, and then sob immediately after (>OKAY CUTEEEEEE ). Our meetings were not only sexual: we would travel the Sacred Way to Eleusis, swim naked in the Aegean sea, and mosh to metalcore that Ada’s cool new friends deemed “too dorky”. Once we even were back at the same old used bookstore but this time we were coworkers instead of thieves. I started sleeping at weird times to line up with her sleep schedule. Our dreams felt more real than my waking life and every morning I could still smell her on my skin and once even found one of her long brown hairs on my pillowcase.
Then she and Ada started hitchhiking the northern Sahara along the Cairo-Dakar Highway. Her sleep schedule more erratic, we met less consistently, and then not at all. When summer came, I didn’t hear anything about her coming back.
>how is ur full moon
>did like 4 massive bong rips of blue lotus and slept with a bay leaf under my pillow
>oh so you did find more
>ya finally in Marrakesh
>al madina baby
>like 30usd/oz is that a good deal
>no
>oh!
>me and ada finally dreamshared
>ive been teaching her hehe
>we were on a purple spaceship the dream lasted an entire month it felt like
>i think lotus on the full moon was her breakthrough though. ty for showing me it <3
>flying to italia tomorrow <3 her folks have a summer home there. gonna relax for a bit before we decide where to go next
I started ignoring her texts. Later she posted a picture of herself sunbathing topless by the pool of a terracotta-roofed villa next to a donkey farm. I lingered a bit too long on before deactivating my Tumblr.
I was visiting my grandma who, nearly deaf, would play cable news at full volume all day long, when I heard that a magnitude 6.2 earthquake in Amatrice had killed hundreds. I couldn’t remember what part of Italy she had been in or if she had even told me but for some reason I thought it started with an “A”. I texted her for the first time in a week.
>babe what part of Italy are you in
>what city
>please i need to know
>amalfi coast <3 its so nice here
>oh my fucking god
>thank god
>I thought you died earthquake
>ohhhh no omg im fine I just don’t have good service here!!
>maybe we can dream again soon its been a while </3
In the dream we were teaching a science lab together, not at the college but at my old middle school and I accidentally blew up some metal tongs in the microwave.
>Text to speech from right now or I am I am I am on. I am on the toilet right now and I’m drunk so drunk and I am doing text to speech LOL OK, so do you remember that vegan Marxist guy Brett? I am on a date? Job interview? With him no bullshit No Cuz girl he wants to hire me for a fucking job bitch No, but like get this get this, he might take me to Syria to join the fucking YPG
>what are you talking about
>It’s for his YouTube ha ha, ha ha ha, ha, ha, ha, ha I don’t know if I should go
I didn’t want to hear about her idyllic life with Ada while I was trapped watching it from behind a screen, even if said adventures involved threesomes with weird Marxist influencers. I guess that’s why I didn’t take the Rojava stuff too seriously — it was hardly her most outlandish whim.
Until one day, I stopped hearing from her entirely. At first, it felt like a relief to not be constantly reminded of what didn’t happen between us in Egypt, but after a few days, I started getting worried. Her social media went dark, and she wouldn’t answer my calls. I spent hours scouring Ada’s Syria vlogs; the videos never featured her, but I would play them frame-by-frame, analyzing the shadows for any trace of her. The height of the camera, at times, seemed a little too low, and the videos were too pixelated to see who was reflected in Ada’s eyes in her tactical gear GRWM videos. I spent my nights trying to track down her digital paper trail, but it was as if she had disappeared from this reality to the dream plane itself, where she and I still meet every night.
> We were lying in bed together watching popstar never stop never stopping on your phone the part where Seal gets mauled by wolves and i said i had to go cuz it was time to wake up and you just looked at me so sadly
>I developed the roll of film you left with me and it was just pictures of an island
>You were in my dream I was in a group call with you and your grandma??
>I invited you to a party but you were too sleepy from jet lag and I felt bad because the party was just 3 or 4 of my coworkers sitting on the floor playing with kittens someone was fostering
>this was a funny one. i had to pick you up from the hospital because you decided to stop being vegetarian and ate a burger, and then got sick
>I dreamt that you messaged me from a new account “I feel empty because there are things I wish we had done while we still had time” and then a link to a secret VPN so we could communicate without Ada knowing but I couldn’t figure out how to log in
>I dreamt of wormwood, used in love potions
>I dreamt you were here again, that you knocked on my door and I was so happy you were here and I said you can use my car while Im at work as long as you pick me up from my bus stop at 3:15
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