I was late, as usual, and couldn't find you. I was carrying too much, kept dropping things all over the place and stopping to pick them up again. I ran through airport checkpoints with my ticket, which was one of the things I kept dropping.
Where was the gate? I watched time slip away on any number of clocks but had no idea where the gate was or how to get there. I stopped for a beer when I knew I wouldn't find you. I began sobbing and ended up on a beach.
Where did the beach come from? Where did the airport go? The tears receded as the tide rolled in and I ran across the hot sand. I had no idea where I was or how I'd gotten there.
* * *
Self-fulfilling prophecies are troublesome. Belief and mind-sets, cause and effect. Reality is nothing more than dreams come to life. Vonnegut advised us to be careful about what we pretend to be. We should be similarly careful about what we dream, for example, getting lost at the airport.
That extrapolation probably makes no sense, but what if it did? What if dreams were a necessary precursor to reality? Stronger than that. What if there were an exact correlation between our current dreams and future reality?
That sounds a lot like the age of superstition. Explanations are needed to create coherent narratives in our minds that allow us to continue moving forward as a species. But what happens when those explanations are wrong and we cling to them anyway?
* * *
In the end, it's hard to keep moving forward. Life is more like dropping things and having no idea where you are, where you're trying to go, or how to get there. Let's hope this isn't self-fulfilling.
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