Cynthia

A few nights ago, Cynthia came to me in a dream.

For me, it’s not especially interesting what happened in that dream—I don’t remember any of it other than the tenor—just that she was there.

Thirty-plus years ago, I got my first job in a law firm. I was supposed to be a temp for someone on vacation, and the office manager liked my work enough that they kept me on longer, then said they would hire me if I would agree to keep my hair pulled back into a top knot, which I did.

I was only at that firm for a little less than two years, but I guess because I was the age I was—when my brain may well have been the sharpest it would ever be—it feels almost as long as the nearly thirty years I’ve worked at the firm I’m at now. I remember the layout of the office and the names of the people and the stories we shared with each other while working, or in between working, or just after working (or about working, either when one or another of us wasn’t around for a particular incident, or about the particular incident if we all couldn’t believe it).

And yet, having said that, there’s so, so much I’ve forgotten and will just keep forgetting.

Like Cynthia.

I don’t remember when she started there, and I don’t remember who she worked for. She was a legal secretary, I remember that, and I want to say she sat at the desk in the Southeast corner of the building, the corner that I think of as a darker corner, the quieter one, right next to the law library.

Cynthia was also quiet and dark. She was short—squat—with very round eyes. Soft spoken but enunciated well.

I don’t remember how we ended up talking about, but she told me her favorite book was Fisher’s Hornpipe, a book nobody else she had ever met had ever read. She was prone to buying used copies whenever she found them and gifting them to people in the hopes they would read them.

She gave me a copy. I never read it.

She got ill. I don’t remember with what. For a while, she was in poor health, and moved slowly. (Maybe with a walker?) At one point, talking with the woman I was in love with and a coworker who I suspect had a crush on me, I made a very cruel joke about how slowly she moved. The people I told it to laughed very hard.

That still haunts me, that joke. Shame is like water, it seeps into everything, flows up the page. I can’t remember if I was ashamed as soon as I made the joke, or later that night, or after I fell out of love with the woman I was in love with and how I had courted her, too often, with cruelty.

Or if it was when Cynthia told me she was dying, I don’t remember of what.

It all seems too unlikely, doesn’t it? Why would she tell me she was dying? (It was much more likely someone else who knew would’ve told me, after she stopped working there.)

But then, why did she lend me the book?

And why did she appear in my dreams just a few nights ago?

The dead rarely appear in my dreams. I’ve had people I loved die when we were young, and over decades and decades those people showed up barely more than twice. And when they do, they are dour. I remember a dream I had of my best friend, Chris, after he’d been dead about five years or so. He was in my dream and I threw my arms around him, and he said, grimly, “This is not that kind of visit.”

Also, I have dreams in which either due to poor communication or a prank or a conspiracy or some combination of the three, it turns out I was wrong about them being dead, which I suspect is not uncommon. And one time I know my dead sister came back to console me about the death of my other sister, which is the kind of thing the sleeping minds do—or mine does—as I’ve only ever had the one sister.

And so it’s not surprising that the tenor of the dream with Cynthia was subdued, though I don’t remember it being that subdued, not at “you hug your dead best friend and his lips purse in annoyance as you do so” levels anyway. It’s just remarkable she was there.

It’s remarkable I remember her, honestly. We were not close. I don’t know, for example, if she had a lot of friends outside work, or if she came from a big, loving family, or who thinks about her now.

My worry is she didn’t and the answer is nobody, nobody remembers her except me and I don’t remember her last name and more than half the time I worry I’ve misremembered her first name.

I barely remember what she looks like, as if I only ever saw her out of the corner of my eye the entire time, dark hair and round eyes and a soft voice I somehow never misheard. She makes me think of a stone in a river, just one stone among all the other stones, dark and silent and there. Different only in that it’s the stone you see, not all the ones you don’t.

I don’t even know if I should be grateful for whatever odd alchemy bonded her to my brain—youth and shame and a book I never read—or if it makes me sad, this misdirected way I mourn, and maybe everybody mourns: not the people I choose to mourn, but the people I somehow remember, for whatever reason.

As it was with their death—as it is with dreams—I have no say in the matter. It just is, until it’s not.

And then the dream is done.