do you still listen to good music?

I keep having this dream. Well, no, not the same dream, but the dreams are the same in that they revolve around this one person who I know, or used to know, in real life. I haven't seen this girl in a good seven or eight years, and I keep having dreams about her, usually at least once a month.

Charity and I were two-thirds of a trio in my nightmarish sixth grade class. The other third was a tomboy named Macie, and we were kind of the misfits. Misfits in that we were the most normal people in this class. I got some interesting education in that class, learning of things and acts that I did not know could ever exist, and I'm still not convinced that some of them do.

But I really didn't know anyone in that class. I had gone to elementary school with some of them but knew them only minimally. All my friends had been put in the same class two doors down. And so I guess I always thought of Charity and Macie as secondary friends, as unfair as that was. We were more buddies than friends. We didn't really share like adolescent girls usually do, we just goofed off. We got in trouble a lot, and we would have gotten detention if my teacher had had the heart to send a good girl like me. Me! In detention! The shame would have killed me.

Anyway, Charity and I were in the same seventh grade class as well, and then we had eighth grade Algebra together. We always sat together and made comments to each other under our breaths the whole class period through. But it was a low maintenance friendship. I don't think we ever called each other, and I didn't even know where she lived. We were only friends during certain class periods, and then we were just two people. And then Charity went to a different high school than I did, and we were just two people all the time. I saw her at a couple of football games my freshman year, but then I never saw her again.

I don't think I appreciated Charity as much as I should have. Looking back, I think she was a lot cooler and more fun than I really gave her credit for. We were the only eighth graders who listened to They Might Be Giants, and I should have recognized that as a sign that she was good people.

But I didn't think about all of that until the dreams started happening. In the first one, she killed herself. The second one was similar. In another, she borrows money from me to go to beauty school or buy drugs. And each time I have another dream, it brings Charity to the front of my mind, which of course makes me have more dreams about her. Thankfully, the dreams aren't so depressing anymore. Usually, I'm just looking for her, and then I find her and tell her about the dreams and how I was sorry that we drifted apart and that I wasn't a better friend. Every time I have a dream, I think about calling her, though I don't know what I'd say or how I'd even find her. There really is no good way to say, "Hey, we haven't spoken since we were 14, but I keep having these weird dreams about you and I was wondering what you're up to. Do you still listen to good music?"

Or maybe there is a good way to say it. And maybe someday, the dreams will drive me just crazy enough to find a way to say it, whether there's a good way or not.