a long one.
It started with Andrew getting back from vacation. Instead of lending our guitar to Jeff our roommate (like in real life), we had lent it to Andrew H and we encountered his luggage, guitar included, in a subway station. We started walking away with it (half thinking he was kidnapped, half thinking it would be funny to hide with it until he returned) when he came breathlessly running and said “Thank God! I thought it all would have been stolen by now!” Apparently he had been on a train when he remembered, which he was able to stop and get off of before it completely left the station. Then he was like, “It’s too bad about your guitar though! I lost it!” I turned with an “aha!” and showed him the guitar on my shoulder. He said, “No, that’s the guitar I bought.” And he opened our baby Taylor case and showed us this crappy nylon-string guitar. I was upset. I thought to myself, did he lose the guitar and not the case because he put his new guitar in our case, and was transporting ours without a case? He wasn’t very apologetic, nor did he offer to let us keep this one. He just shrugged.
A little later we were all in a big van with Mike and Jesse and a bunch of girls from my college - Kate, Meaghan, Rachel, Sara, Nell… all as their current selves. I was in the front middle seat of the car, with the driver (one of my college friends.. Meaghan maybe) and also with Jesse’s mom on my right. I got over being upset about the guitar.
A while later we stopped at a train station where it appeared that we were going to be taking a break. I waited for like half an hour in the van and laughed a lot with Kate and Meaghan. Then I saw Nell on the corner with her Olympia friends through the window. She had turquoise ends on her hair. I put my shoes on and got out. When I found Nell she was sitting with Sara M. in a courtyard, on chairs. I sat down with them and soon a bunch of people joined us. At one point someone from the van came and asked if I needed anything from the van and I said no. Soon it dawned on me that I should have brought my backpack, it seemed like we were going to be staying. The station was an outdoor, Amtrak train station that was also a hotel.
At some point it was just me and Sara and Nell again. Nell said to me, “Can you go pick up my medication? It’s at my pharmacy.” I couldn’t tell if she was serious. Then I sort of raised an eyebrow and gave her a questioning look and she said, “You know how we talked once about trans people and I said that I liked being a woman?” She paused. After a second I said, “You’re trans now?” She said yes. I said, “Wow!” and gave her a hug.
Then I started feeling a little upset that she would tell me in a group situation and so nonchalantly, expecting me to just be like, “Oh cool,” after I remember her talking so emphatically about liking being female. She suddenly had the pills with her, in all different colors, and they looked to me like they were made out of the same stuff as Flintstone chewable vitamins. She was packing them in some kind of big flat pill container with pill-shaped holes for the pills, and they kept landing on me (she was now sitting on a ledge of a window with her feet on the bench she was sitting on before).
Then I sort of woke up from the dream, and I’m not sure whether I woke up in real life or just into another dream. But I thought to myself, “Was that real?” I wasn’t sure if I had just dozed off at the station and had a dream within a dream. In either case I decided I had to find out if I had dreamed it or not. I felt really upset about it, for the reasons I said before, and also I felt like I wanted to say goodbye to Nell as she was. I wondered what her name would be. Would she keep her name somehow? Would she modify it to something like “Nel,” or change it to something totally different? I went back to sleep.
I tracked down Nell again at the station — she was inside now with some of her Olympia friends. I said, “Did that stuff with the pills really just happen?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “OK.” I told her I felt upset but I shouldn’t. James from Integral was there and I said something awkward like, “I’ve known James for seven years, I don’t have a problem with trans people!” and then I blubbered that I’d known her for eleven years (which is true!) and I felt emotional that she was going to change. Without much response, she got back into a conversation with one of her friends. A little later I caught her alone and said, “Are you going to change your name?” She said, “Of course.” But it was a different person who said it and suddenly I realized she had morphed into someone else who looked more like Jennifer Moore.
For the rest of the dream I frantically looked for her and cried a lot, sort of mourning that I wouldn’t get to see her until she had transitioned and I didn’t even know her new name. I felt annoyed at Olympia queer culture, but I knew that was insane of me.
