I met myself this morning. In a dream.
Lately, I have been feeling rather tired. And even though I am putting myself to bed early, I still wake up exhausted the next morning.
This morning was a fine example of this. I had hit the snooze button about a dozen times already without finding the courage to tear myself away from the sheets. I could see the minutes go by, faster and faster. It felt very much like this menacing alarm clock was just going off again and again without ever pausing to actually let me slumber a bit.
And then something changed. Everything was different. The room looked different. The winter darkness outside was replaced by a warmer light. A short distance from the bed, a kid was standing, looking at me. He was between two and three years old, had light curly hair and was wearing ugly blue and orange pyjamas with white stripes, the kind that you could probably only find in the 1980s when I was a kid myself.
The little boy was just standing there. He didn't seem scared or anything. He was just waiting patiently, probably for me to wake up. Then I knew. I just knew this kid was a younger me. He looked so young, so innocent, so impervious to life's hustles.
We slowly moved in closer to each other and we started talking. It was just meaningless babbling, very simple words, only to establish a contact between us. And then we played together. And we laughed, so hard. We were so close. Everything felt smooth, easy, obvious.
Then my mom stepped in the room. There was a flood of light where she stood. She looked younger, probably how I remember her from when I was a teenager. It hit me much later that I may have been younger myself, possibly around fourteen. My mom could not see both of my selves. She only saw the bigger me, playing by the bed with some imaginary friend, the way kids convincingly do.
All of a sudden, the light was gone. I was left alone back in the cold and damp winter darkness of my room. And I felt so lonely, abandoned even. I tried to close my eyes to conjure the dream back, to no avail. I sat up in my bed and stayed like this for a while, mesmerized.