Dinosaur With Headphones

I've been having such sorrowful dreams.

Today my dream started out back in the basement of a house that doesn't exist but that is a real place. I was going back to work with the kids I used to work with, and as I was moving my stuff in these other people were getting in my way and starting to take up the space. I moved my bed in and they put a couch in front of it and just laid on the bed and sat on the couch, ignoring me. They were nudging me out and so I had to go wander. I wandered around the fictional corridors of this mansion-sized basement, feeling blue, unwanted and displaced.
Then I remember somehow I was suddenly wandering the streets of Lincoln on a wet gray day. As I was walking, downcast, I came across the first girl I ever had a crush on back in elementary school. Her name was Melanie. I liked her because she was pretty, sweet, shy and goofy. She was grown up in my dream and we flirted a bit, then she let me take her on a walk. She looked down and asked me about my shoes. We were both wearing white shoes but mine were very dirty. She said that she loved wearing white shoes, and I said me too, and then I tried to explain that I normally don't let them get this dirty because I was embarrassed. Then I looked down again and my shoes had turned into my black work shoes.
I asked about her life and she said that she had so much to tell me, with a big excited smile on her face, but that I probably wasn't interested. I told her of course I was interested, and she was happy I was interested. I was having those early feelings you get when you meet somebody new and it feels sweet, swellingly sweet. I had longed for that feeling and that connection. We stopped for coffee at this open shop, and at one of the tables in the shop a bunch of guys that I used to know were sitting around it. I try to avoid eye contact because I just wanted to keep walking with Melanie. But they were staring at me so I gave them a head nod and then Melanie and I left.

I haven't described everything in the dream, but I know what the dream meant.

It was about second chances. Wanting to go back and redo things in my life, do them differently, do them better, etc. Wanting a do-over, wanting to re-connect to life and to being and to being with someone warm and sweet and funny and kind. Wanting to be better at being me.

But it was only a dream.

Like F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote in an unfinished novel, "There are no second acts in American lives."

Once you dirty your white shoes, there is no going back.