Black Pearl

I dreamt about you last night. Well, technically I dreamt about your mother coming to commemorate the anniversary of...well, yeah. She was in Kenya with us, at our old place and it went well. She was well. Facebook let me know this morning that her birthday is soon. What are the odds. Anyway, I woke up short of breath because I realised how much I genuinely missed you, or the you I knew before…yeah. 

I think about you often, not as often as I’d ever imagined when you were gone, but I suppose that’s life? I think of the kind of life you would be leading now. I tell myself we would be complete strangers at this point but I figure we would have kept the occasional tabs on each other. One of us would break the silence every other month, or year. We would find out how the other is doing, engage in some inconsequential small talk, probably after one of us liked the other’s picture or something on Facebook, reminding us the other exists and is living a life outside our own. 

I imagine your Facebook profile reading like a travel guide with pictures of you backpacking all over the world, scaling mountains and kayaking, I don’t know, the Zambezi. After some time skimming through, there would be one particular picture of you grinning at the camera atop some mountain with a breathtaking landscape in the back drop, your face is shiny and flushed but you radiate joy and youth, so beautifully. This would likely be the picture that sparks a conversation after me liking it; I would tell you to make it your profile picture. 

I wonder whether you would use any other social media platforms and arrive at the conclusion that you wouldn’t; you barely use Facebook, all pictures I am able to gauge of the life your living are from tags by others. You were the worst about updating your profile and posting things, always in the moment, I doubt that would change with time. 

I think about who you would be dating, my imagination always conjures up a perky petite brunette with an infectious laugh, always ready to go off on an adventure with you. There’s probably pictures of you two from all over the world. You would look so good together and I know I would stalk your profile for as much information on you two as I could. I imagine feeling a tinge of jealousy but oddly satisfied and happy to see you happy. You look perfect together. 

When we get around to it, we would talk about our love lives, gush about our significant others and all the different ways they are changing us and making us happy. We would probably joke about going on a double date if we ever got around to being in the same place in the world. "Same place in the world", I feel like this would be the most consistent part of any conversation we would have in the course of a year, planning to meet up someday, somewhere but we would both know that that was unlikely to happen, but we would still insist on talking about it, planning for it. 

Pretty sure we would bond over a myriad of series, I would tell you to watch Black Mirror, which you wouldn’t, you would tell me to watch Westworld, which I have. I would tell you about my increased use of Spotify and about all the new music I’ve been listening to, whenever we would get around to talking that is. You would scoff at my taste and it would shock you to note that my tastes have become more…diverse. Not as much of a metalhead as I was when…yeah. 

I can’t picture what you would be doing for work, which saddens me because I realise we didn’t make a point of talking about your future enough, so focused on finishing school, there wasn’t much talk about life after that. I’m sure you would be doing something fun though; I can’t picture you in an office, suit and tie, behind a desk, hunched over a computer, weighed down by the Man and the pressures of an office job. You were too much of a free-spirit for that, but then again I may be wrong, maybe you would grow out of it, become more grounded, settle down, it pains me not knowing...