The Obvious

“Jesus Christ, what happened to your hair? You cut it.”

“I had help.”

“I can’t believe how different you look. Well, it will grow.”

“You think?”

People tend to point out the obvious. I guess it isn’t really the words, though, that are making the meaning of the statement. It is the social custom, the noticing, etc. I could tell by the nonverbal stuff that he was happy about my haircut. But maybe it was my own paranoia.

“I’ve been having a lot of dreams lately," he said. "They’ve been strange. I’ve been dreaming about an Asian woman. In the dream, she married one of my old friends. We are not that close any more, so I don’t know why he’s in the dream. But he married her and when I met her, I fell in love. She’s perfect, beautiful and happy, and she is in love with me, too. In the dream. She looks at me and I get sad. I wake up in the night and think about the dream and go back to sleep and I am right back in it. One night, she kissed me. Everything is vivid. It seems so real.”

I thought of a line from Bertolucci’s Under the Sheltering Sky. “Other people’s dreams are always so boring.” But I didn't say it. He seemed too animated in the telling, too disturbed. I said simply, “Dreams can be crazy.” It meant nothing. I had pointed out the obvious.

I am trying to photograph a dream, other places, other times that have never existed. It is slow going and I lose faith, sometimes to the point of despair. I have never been very good at faith, and I haven’t had a dream for a long time.

My hair will grow. That much is obvious. I don’t know about the rest.