So much of our relationships with one another occurs below the surface.  We look to our interactions in this everyday reality to explain our feelings (or adjust them appropriately), but everyday interactions are just the tip of the iceberg.

A friend brought his all time favorite movie to my house, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  I noticed things about the movie that I never caught the first time, years ago.  Now, after my world (or rather my perception of it) has so dramatically changed, the movie struck me differently.

In a final scene, Joel is reaching the end of his memory deletion process.  Soon, all memories of Clementine will be gone from his brain.  He looks at her in his imagination.  She seems to have a life of her own as she plays through his mind and approaches him to say good-bye.  In that last wisp of memory, Clementine whispers something into Joel’s ear: “Meet me… in Montauk.”

I missed that the first time.  The movie begins with Joel waiting for a train.  He has already wiped his memory clear of Clementine, and Clementine has erased Joel.  On a whim, Joel decides to ditch work and go to Montauk.  He arrives, briefcase in hand, on a beach at midday, and in the distance is a stranger to whom he finds himself oddly drawn.  She is Clementine.

They cross paths many times that day and eventually strike up a conversation on the train.  She acts as though she has known Joel for a long time.  Watching the movie, I noticed how frequently they would make observations of their own thoughts and feelings and, not knowing their origins in past experiences now forgotten, attribute them to personal neuroses or quirks of human nature.

But those words, “meet me in Montauk,” they struck me.  They were a quiet little suggestion that our thoughts, memories and fantasies of one another are not as dead and disconnected from those we love as we think.

Many nights ago, I had yet another dream that someone I once loved, the Latino dancing aficionado from Florida, was in my arms, and all I felt was love.  The dream felt so simple and open, but I realized I was dreaming, and I woke myself up.

A week later, I was watching Eternal Sunshine with, coincidentally, a Latino dancing aficiondo from Florida (which sort of reminded me of the character in the movie who stole Joel’s diary and attempted to woo Clementine by replicating her experiences with Joel).  Do we gravitate towards pale replicas of those we love when some part of us feels a loss we can’t explain?

I wondered if the dream was just my own imagination.

Is there any such thing?  Years ago, I was painfully in love with someone who was getting married at the same time that I was getting divorced (which was around the time I first saw Eternal Sunshine).  I struggled hard to get over him, but my mind was pulled to him again and again.  At night, he would enter my fantasies, and every energy center in my body would open wide, as though a river of energy were gushing through me.  In waking life, we met for coffee often, and we talked for hours, and I felt a connection with him.  At times, I could swear I saw a pink glow surrounding him, but I was just a girl with a crush.

One night, I had a vivid, lucid dream that we were running through the forest together.  A wild boar was chasing after us.  We encountered a precipice and stopped, a cliff on one side and the beast on the other.  He felt so real.  He grabbed my waist, tugging at my skin, pulled me close, and kissed me.  I woke up short of breath.  I felt… satiated.

On another occassion, I showed him the cover of a magazine sporting one of my paintings, the woman reclining on her bed staring out at the moon.  He made no comment, except to say, “And that’s you, of course.”  He rushed off to a boring meeting while I went home and felt a strong compulsion to sketch an image that appeared in my mind.  It looked like him with the painting of me in his heart.

On a quiet evening not long after my dream, I lay down to meditate, growing utterly still and silent.  Blank.  Suddenly, I saw an image of his face.  The image appeared in my mind out of nowhere, vivid and clear.  His head was down, and he was crying.  “As though someone died tragically and without warning,” I thought.  His grief overtook me.  I shook with it and cried hard.  Quickly though, I “came to,” looked at myself and said, “What?  Don’t be silly!”

The next morning, he sent me a message.  His cat had been run over by a car, and he had spent the evening in tears.  I remembered the grief in my meditation, and the perception was so striking that I was never the same.  My worldview shifted.

Weeks later, something strange happened.  I reached out to him in my imagination, but instead of feeling his warmth, I found myself under a rug, and he was sitting on it!  “What the hell?” I thought.  I mean, seriously, this was my fantasy!  He was sitting on top of me, stifling and smothering me under this rug, and for the life of me, I could not imagine myself in his presence any other way.  I made a mental note of it.

The next time we spoke, he was more frank with me than he had ever been.  He talked about his marriage and his efforts to cultivate loyalty and fortitude.  “I’ve been strengthening my resolve,” he said, and he implied as delicately and indirectly as he could that he was pushing down thoughts of me.

I got out of his life immediately.  I stopped speaking to him.  Love is far more precious than passion, and I did love him very much.  I would rather a man feel my love than my touch, if I had to choose.  From that day on, every time I thought of him, I imagined him and his wife surrounded with love and warmth, encircled with string lights, happy and strong… and me far away!

After that, I met the beautiful dancer who made all of my passionate fantasies come to life.  Holy mother of heaven.  I was blown away.

Passion can take you very deep.  You can reach someone’s inner being and discover your common energy.  But if you forget what passion showed you, it’s easy to gravitate towards passion for its own sake and lose your awareness of love.  You lose consciousness of the other person, and you lose the sense organs in your soul that allow you to feel their love.

A year later, I still dream of him.  I keep asking myself, why can’t I forget him and proceed with my life as though the warmth and sweetness of his energy is far behind me?  Why does he linger?  Maybe… maybe… because he is not really gone.  Not completely.

In my imagination, I approach him, afraid but open, look into him with every intention of seeing what is truly there, and whisper in his ear, “Meet me… in Montauk.”

Meet me… in the beautiful forest by the water where everyone has gathered to dance and love, share and embrace, by the bonfire under the stars.