I can’t express the longing I feel for the places I visit in my dreams. They’re places I’m new to, yet they’re home. Lately I’ve been dreaming about Argentina, Spain and last night, Patagonia.
The city in Patagonia was completely new yet I had a life there. Often I dream about places more than once. A city on the coast of South Africa, a triangle shaped Victorian apartment overlooking the sea.
A neighbourhood in Buenos Aires under a series of overpasses (no such area in the city that I know of) with a market and clubs, A city with an l train and airport above it, I’m usually lost in this one on my motorcycle trying to navigate the confusing roads.
This city in Patagonia might be my favorite of them all. It starts with a woman walking into town, showing my the place. We start in the mostly treeless hills around the city, green and beautiful. We pass a hillside cemetery where some of the headstones are falling over a bit. A raven is trying to knock on a statue with a circle, hitting the circle like a button but nothing happens.
The woman has a drone and I see the surrounding hills from a birds eye view, some of the time with the drone itself in view. Below are some trees, people walking into town, glimpses of the city in the distance.
I get into town and the streets are wide like a South American or Mexican village and I start to suspect where I am. I hear about a rich man who spent so much money getting his things there that he was going broke (reminded me of a guy I met in Argentina who paid $10k US to ship his things to Buenos Aires and they were all stolen). I walk past the place where the ‘rich man’ works, the business he owns, and he’s frustrated and panicked about something. There is a large seal hanging around the parking lot and it’s wild yet friendly, having come up some channel from the ocean to visit. I spend some time with him, playing and rolling around wrestling I notice he looks super cute and try to take a photo but then he just looks like a baby so I don’t. He gets annoyed with me and goes away for a while but we eventually become friends again and snuggle on a couch.
I have a job, they’ve given me two computers, a desktop and laptop and I work in an office full of standing desks and sort of punkish women (south american style punks, the best). At some point I’m lying on a table waiting to get measured because we’re supposed to order wet suits for something. I ask about what shipping it like, because everything can take forever, but really I only know about shipping from the US. Everyone gets distracted talking about that and I just get up and go to the front desk area where some mail is waiting for me, including a calendar that looks like it’s taken a year to get to me. Dirty, previously damp.
I poke my head in some guys office and they’re chatting about suicide or something. I mention a guy I dated who was suicidal, not mentioning that I often am as well. The guy sitting asks if it’s always been a thing of just this generation and I think it’s probably most people in our generation, thanks to the state of the world.
But this place is shut off from most the world, isolated yet modern in its own way. I want this job, I want these friends, I want that life in that city.
I tried to find it on a map but no luck yet if it really exists. I can’t decide if these places I dream about exist and my context or location is off or if my brain is actually just creating them. Homes I can never have, places I can never go, lives I can never live.