time travel

So I built a machine in my mind, and now I can accelerate to the edges of the expanding universe whilst sleeping.

It is fueled by my sleep apnea/insomnia and incessant snoring.

Last night, after a less-than-stellar gig in Long Beach that found me questioning my existence a little deeper than usual, I got home and slept off my drunk with journeys into my past, courtesy of the astral plane.

I ended up in my old neighborhood, as a little boy. My next door neighbor Sophie was there, just like the first time I saw her. She was in the alley behind our homes, helping her parents wash their car. She kept looking over at me and I kept on looking over at her.

Then, the time machine scooted me up a few years later, when she and I were best friends. She would walk over to my house and knock on my door and ask my mother if I could come out and play.

My mother absolutely adored Sophie. My mother often made jokes about how she and I would end up getting married someday. These jokes would embarrass me back then, but last night in my dream I wanted to step out of the time machine and tell myself back then that I shouldn't be ashamed of this love, that one day I would wish intently that Sophie was still around...

I woke up at one point and realized that my thus-far commitment to never getting married is intrinsically linked to Sophie's absence from my life.

I went back under and traveled on to the last time I saw her: as a teenager, sixteen, clumsy and shy, with shoulder-length locks and glasses as thick as a welder's goggles.

Sophie was a young woman at that point, no longer a tomboy whom I considered an equal. She was way out of my league, and yet she consorted with potential criminals and taggers.

She thought I was ridiculous.

I woke up again, interrupted this time by the need to drain the alcohol out of me. This time, I linked in my mind the need to know if Sophie has ever thought of me in the past twenty years with the recent revelation of Eve thinking of me while she was with Dick.

Once more, I descended into sleep and took a trip back into time.

I ended up somewhere in the middle, during a time when I took her for granted and figured that she and I would be friends forever.

Sophie told me that she thought I was the smartest person she ever knew, and she asked me to help her with her homework.

She and I went to the same school, but I was in the Magnet and she was a "regular" student. We weren't supposed to socialize at school, but afterwards she would walk over two houses down and knock on my door, and we'd ride our bikes and play stickball all day long, until it was time to eat dinner.

I helped her with her homework, and as I watched us I realized that she probably has found a man by now and married him, and has kids, most likely in the wake of some wild partying years and bad relationships.

And for some reason, I could hear her-- not in the past, but in the present --telling me to stop searching for her, that she was alright, that she ended up doing good, and that even though we have been apart for decades she still ended up finding a good man, maybe not as good as I was to her but just as good, and that she never ever forgot me throughout the years...

And when I woke up, I felt very calm.