If "surreal" means "dreamlike", well, it was more like a dream that I'd finally stopped having years ago suddenly came back, but this time it was real. Here's the backstory:
I had a best friend in high school who turned out not to be the best of friends. It wasn't even so much that she started going out with my boyfriend the second after (or maybe before) he and I broke up. The break-up was just what happens to high school relationships, not so much a big deal, and within a few weeks, he and I were getting along just fine. The problem with her was that she had trouble facing things with me, like a) not telling me until a week or two before that she had chosen someone else to be her graduation partner, and b) avoiding me 100% the summer after graduation because she couldn't tell me she was seeing the ex. When I would call her house, her mother would just say "Oh, she can't come to the phone right now." The foolish innocent, I didn't even realize that the friendship was over. I needed closure here, some kind, any kind. She wrote me a long letter during our first semester in college - she was in Indiana - and tearfully came clean about the boy. Well, I was happy for the two of them, but seriously hurt that she hadn't ever told me. When I came home at Christmas, I didn't even call her, and for damn sure she didn't call me.
I had dreams about her for years after that. Seriously, maybe twenty years. Not often, probably whenever something else happened in my life that I felt I needed closure on, the shadow of Ellen would rise in my subconscious, and I would be facing her, maybe even in the school hallways, and saying "You know, you should have said something. You should have told me." I finally stopped dreaming that, maybe ten or more years now. After all, this is something that happened in 1971. Ultimately, time and the rest of my life going on brought about closure of some sort.
The last time I talked to her was at high school graduation, where I walked with someone else but sat near her, and afterwards, she went out to a party with her group of new friends. (The ex -- Bob -- didn't take part in the ceremony.) She married him, actually, in 1975; oddly, I ran into him a few days later and we had a nice conversation. That's the last time I talked to him. I knew that they had divorced after a few years, no children, and had since both remarried and had daughters.
So you can picture this morning: one of the secretaries from the main office came up to the library and said there was an alumna here, visiting in town, and stopped in and wants to say hello to me. Says she graduated with me. It's Ellen.
I swear, I could not formulate an answer. My heart began to pound, and each beat is going "Clo-sure! Clo-sure!" Finally, I said to send her up.
And there she was. Tall, still, to my short. Looks way more like her mother than like the Ellen I knew. Of course, she's 50 now, too. She was so smiley, never stopped grinning the whole time. Seemed happy to see me. This was so, so, so strange.
I asked what she was doing in town; I knew that her parents no longer lived here. Funny thing, she was here to visit Bob's mother, who lives nearby; of course, I knew her, too. Lovely, lovely lady, now a widow, in her mid to late eighties, I would think. She was very nice to me, as was her husband, when I was going out with their son for almost two years. I sent my regards.
So we went around, we came around. Parents, siblings, Bob; now I know how everyone is. Here's a funny thing:
Ellen said that although she's never stopped in at the high school after all these years, she has dreams about it. She has dreams that she's at her locker but she can't remember the combination. Not an uncommon dream, I think; I know I've had that one, too. She wondered if I could show her the school a bit, walk down the halls. I couldn't, as the SCM is out today and I couldn't leave kids in the library unsupervised, but I gave her directions, and told her how to find her locker. Of course I know where it was. I kept my books there all sophomore year.
Do you still need closure when you no longer give a rat's ass about the issue that started it all? Is the issue even still open when it's such a meaningless thing from so long ago? I didn't, and as I think about it again and again today, really, I didn't. Got it anyway.
Really, it's a good thing I saw her in life, and not in a dream. If she'd looked like that in any dream I ever had, I wouldn't have known it was even her.
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I'm watching Oddly enough, Ellen
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