"Is it a memory ..

Here's an odd poem I found, written in 1988. Not too sure what I had in mind - old friends, I think. Bops, probably! I do remember that this was a sad time when I had left India and moved to Bahrain, and he had broken all contact with me - and my heart in the bargain. Later on, I realised he had done the best he could, because had he kept in touch I would have returned to be with him - and smack. But he didn't, and I didn't. And the result is the Me you see today, clean and sober.

When I look at this poem now, I think of dissociation: that confusion between memory and dream, between the world's reality and one's own. I would often dream of friends back then, but never of Bops. I remember once sitting in the ladies' room at Arab Advertising and crying because I wished I could just DREAM of him - that would have been better than nothing. But it never happened, and it's only now, years later, with him dead and gone, that I am sometimes visited by him in dreamtime.

Is it a memory or was it just a dream?
I never know, for they both seem
So real.
It was just yesterday and I can still
Smell the rain in the air,
Draw upon your faces at will.
Then the faces blur and change
And I see strangers.
And the road winds down another way
And the colours are pastel, tinged with grey
And I'm going somewhere I've never been,
Though I know the way.
I hear a voice and touch a face.
But something is wrong
and everything is gone
when I open my eyes.
So how can I know if it ever took place?

(written on 26 July 1988, 8:33 p.m.)