Nightmare

I woke up this morning at 4:22 from the most vivid dream I've had in a long time. After I woke up, I realized that my roommate had turned off our fan and so I was sweltering underneath the piles of covers I insist on sleeping under and this probably had more to do with why I woke up than the dream. But it was still an intense dream and it still had meaning, I think.

When I was younger, I was haunted by my middle school years. Memories of prepubescent cruelty and crushes that never ended well would sneak up behind at the most random of times, forcing me to pull out my dad's old laptop to write story after story of girls who lived perfect lives on beaches and never once forgot who they were. One of the stories that I remember most clearly was called Seven Summer Suns, and it was about a girl named Summer Black who had seven summer romances. I never finished any of the stories because eventually the thing that I really wanted to write about would start leaking out of me and I would abandon my meticulously plotted out charts of which boy Summer liked at which point in time to write semi-autobiographical nonsense.

The thing that I really wanted to write about was a boy named Gun Hi Bae. He was a classmate of mine in 7th grade and a few years preceding that year. He wasn't one of my best friends, but he did sit behind me in my English/History class and sometimes we would make each other laugh. One day in 7th grade, he didn't come to school and our entire class was immediately alarmed because Gun never missed school; he was just one of those kids who either never got sick or never thought it was a good enough excuse to stay home from school. We found out later that his entire family was murdered the previous day because of sketchy business partners of his father, or something like that.

Later that week, we were all invited to his memorial service, and that's where I was in my dream, except it was outdoors and students from my graduating class were there, not my 7th grade class. We were all grown up, too, and I think that's where the nightmare part comes in. We were all grown up and no longer 12 and 13 years old and Gun was still just a 7th grader.

I woke up from this eerie funeral-dream and couldn't stop thinking about a hot tub conversation I had last night regarding the worst thing ever. At 4:22 this morning, I decided on what I think is the worst: Gun's story is the worst and most tragic thing I have ever heard and it's been haunting me for years.

Does my subconscious feel guilty for living through 7th grade? Or is this just my head's way of telling me to start doing something meaningful with my life?

You know what? Who cares? Tragic things happen in the world every day, worse things than what happened to Gun, and I couldn't matter less in that kind of a world. I may have a guilty conscience, but there are people dying out there, right now, and I'm not doing anything to help them.