When traveling I find myself falling in love with nearly every
new face I encounter. I have to stop myself from dwelling on the thought that I
will probably never see these faces again, or else I become a restless traveler running around attempting to absorb way too many
faces at once. And although bidding farewell is the most difficult part of
these travels, I have found that I am able to reconnect with a lot of these
faces in the most peculiar and beautiful way. Because these strange new faces
are so important to me, they are viciously ingrained in my memory and so they
do not hesitate to invade my dreams.
Last night I dreamt of the Egyptian man who ran the
ferry that would take us across the Nile to
our work site every morning. In this dream he asked me out to
dinner, and I graciously accepted. Although he was terribly late he did show up
with a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a warm smile and I was able to forgive
his tardiness. He took me to a nice quiet restaurant located on the rooftop of
a run down hotel right by the Nile and after
we finished eating he asked me why I had decided to stop digging up old bones.
I told him that I was confused about a lot of things but that I did miss it and that perhaps one day I would be ready to do it all over again. He
laughed. I got angry. He laughed some more. I woke up.
As soon as I woke I went through my photos on my computer
because I remembered that I had taken at least one photo of this man. Sure enough I found it, and the funny thing is that he is sleeping in it. I like to think that he too
was in the middle of a dream when I took the photo and that perhaps it too was
a dream about an old familiar face that was buried in his memory, because
thankfully in dreams you can remember what you never realized you had forgotten.
