Just a dream

I had a dream last night that I got a very long, handwritten letter, blue ink on manila paper. I spread out the pages and they covered the entire table. It was from someone that I didn't personally know, but that I knew of, and had talked to a couple of times before. She had been sitting in a cafe in her country, and had just started writing, for no particular reason and had then sent it to me.

The letter had a little bit of everything. She told me all about her life, where she was living, what she was doing. She told me all about the best concerts she had been to, the best stuff she had done. The told me about the worst. She told me about the coffee she was having.

Then on to her family. She started talking about them and how she lived so far away, and how she missed them. She told me about her day, and included the mundane aspects like laundry and dishes, things that you wouldn't normally tell your friends you have done because they are so boring and one would hope that you did other more exciting things with your life.

She told me about her plans for the future, which like mine, are sort of penciled in, as if they could change at any time. She's doing an arts degree, or the equivalent, at college and she really doesn't know what she'll do with it. We're all in the same boat.

She told me about growing up in a small town, where everything and everyone knows each other. "You can't possibly imagine..." she says, and that's true. I can't. I grew up in a small town of 70 000. She talks about how knowing everyone can be both a good and a bad thing at the same time. I can see that.

She talked about the day she was having. She was sitting in a cafe, on the street, even though it was still kind of cold out, and looking at the sun glinting off the backs of the empty chairs there. She was penciling a letter to someone who she really didn't know, but was writing to anyway. Why? Why not? She is a very chatty person. She had just finished school, had the odd day when she didn't have to spend any time with friends doing anything. She had no arrangements, no commitments for the day, so she was writing to me. She didn't need to explain so much.

The waitress was a person who she knew fairly well. When she moved into the city, she had made a lot of friends with sympathetic people because she felt so alone after living in a small town. The waitress was from a small town too, only she wasn't studying, just living. Just getting by. She told me a little bit about her too, just as much as she knew. She didn't exactly like to pry. The waitress had been sick for a while, with some sort of illness whose name sounded really ridiculous to me, but that was the only part of the dream that was wrong or weird. While she had been off, one of the ladies from the night shift was called in to work her shifts and she was nice, but she didn't know the customers like the regular waitress, I think her name was Ana.

And throughout this, she wondered why exactly she was writing this to me, a person on the other side of the world who may or may not really care about what she was saying, why she was saying it. Why not? If you write a letter to someone you don't know, then it's just as good as anonymous, right? Maybe they'll write back, and maybe they won't, and either way, it won't matter too much what they know about you. You can divulge personal information to this stranger as if it were truly an anonymous plea to no one, but you would be sure that someone would get it, and maybe it would get read, which is better than posting it in a blog somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

And maybe this person would reply back. And maybe this person would be genuinely interested in what you had to say. And maybe this person would eventually become your friend, someone you never actually meet, but someone who you can trust to send your secrets to, because you never have to see their face, see their reaction when they read them.

She spent so much time and effort to write that letter that I kind of feel like I should write back, even though it was a dream.