To dream

I dreamed I was back in college last night.  Well I only dreamed of dorm living, which is typical for me.  They told me I was in the buildings to the back, the ones with the tiled roofs.  It looked like a brick bunker with brown ceramic tiles on the roof.  Inside a young woman told me my roommate would be a guy this semester.  She told me this as she pulled the queen sized bed away from the wall and I told her it was okay as long as we could both get out on our own side.

I was still waiting for him to come when I learned that my first assignment was already due.  I needed to write the story of me and include lots of visuals.  At first I felt terrible.  I didn’t know how I could ever do this in time.  I didn’t know where to begin. 

Then I remembered that I really already had all of this in a scrapbook I had made by putting all my papers together with the rings from a three ring binder.  I went to find these papers and met our third roommate, a young woman who was very efficient.  She was trying to figure out how to put her bed in the room.  I found her much more daunting than the idea of having a male roommate.  She saw my stack of papers and wanted to look through them.

Suddenly they didn’t seem good enough.  I realized they were poorly organized and the information barely understandable from a term paper’s point of view.  I sat in the small kitchen, stacks of papers all around me and wondered how I ever got myself into this situation.

Here we were, a woman my age, a young African American man and an efficient young woman with a black ponytail, all living together in two rooms and going to school.  I thought that I was probably supposed to be the one who knew what to do, who had all the answers, but I knew it was really the young woman and I found that disconcerting.