I Forgot the Song, But the Song Didn’t Forget Me

Last night I dreamed I was attending an English Department meeting held, for reasons no dream ever explains, in a recreation room with an adjoining outdoor patio. The setting suggested morale had once been a priority, sometime around 1987.

Inside the rec room, my friend S pressed a pair of earbuds into my hand. They were attached—not metaphorically, but literally—to a CD, which already felt like an archaeological artifact.
“Do you know this song?” she asked.

The music was exquisite. Airy. Radiant. It carried that dangerous quality of being both unfamiliar and deeply known, as if it had once lived inside me and quietly moved out without leaving a forwarding address. I admitted I didn’t recognize it.

She looked at me with the gentlest possible contempt.
“You burned this for me ten years ago.”

I felt properly humiliated. Not embarrassed—abased. As if I’d forgotten the name of a childhood friend or my own middle initial. Then she summoned the band’s leader the way dreams do—no door, no introduction, just a man appearing fully formed.

He was in his late forties, courteous, faintly exhausted, with the posture of someone who has spent years loading gear into vans at 2 a.m. I apologized to him for not recognizing his work. I blamed streaming—how it turns music into sonic wallpaper, a perpetual ambient fog where nothing has to be remembered because everything is always available. In a fit of dream-piety, I vowed to delete every streaming account I owned and return to vinyl, to sacred listening, to LPs spinning on absurdly expensive turntables like a penitent monk.

He nodded shyly, as if he’d heard this promise before, and vanished.

The departmental meeting began outside on the patio, but I lingered inside the rec room instead. I changed into a swimsuit for reasons that felt urgent at the time. I ate snacks—salty, comforting, vaguely institutional—and watched my colleagues through the glass as they discussed the usual bullet points: outcomes, alignment, initiatives. I meant to join them. Truly. But the snacks induced a narcotic drowsiness, and I collapsed onto a yellow beanbag chair like a defeated child at a daycare center. I fell asleep.

When I woke, the meeting was still going on.

Wrapped in a towel over my bathing suit, I finally wandered outside. My younger colleagues informed me I needed to sign the attendance sheet to get my FLEX hours. Unfortunately, the sign-up sheet had already been placed in a wooden box and sent to Human Resources, which in dream logic felt ominous and final, like evidence sealed in a cold case.

The secretary waved it off. She would “put me in the system.”

I thanked her. The meeting droned on. Words floated by without meaning. And all I could think about was that music—its beauty, its ache, its brief visitation. And then, with a second, sharper jolt of recognition, I realized I had forgotten it again.

The song.
The band.

Gone.