I woke before the alarm, standing in a room filled with crystals and stones inside a mall. Alone. Left behind by two “friends” and a boyfriend. It is likely they even took my blue Volt with them, driving away in the guiltless pleasure of having deserted me. I had my cell phone with me and took it out while I surveyed the crowded, lifeless space. It was useless to me. I didn’t have any of their numbers. Even if I had, would they have answered?

It had been a strangely vivid dream. So real it felt like life, yet I had not even been thinking of these three people. Remnants from adolescence angst. The two girls who I felt had once betrayed me and left me behind many years ago, I realized were still haunting me with this fear. We dream what we need to heal, and last night I dreamt the fear of being left behind. Again.

If I take the road back further, driving in my blue car, as I did in the dream, I can retrace the routes I once traveled. Those I had left behind, and those who had left me behind. I am not guiltless, as my dream showed me. There was the girl I’ll call Sally, who tried to get into the car with me. Opened the door blue door to squish her way into the passenger seat with me, while my boyfriend drove and those two former friends sat with glee in the backseat. I told her “no,” that there was “no room for her,” before I shoved her out and closed the door, while thinking about the empty space that could have held her behind me.

It was fall when we traveled the roads in my dream. The season of life before decay. I had gazed in admiration at the hills shrouded in color as we crested the top of one to land in a place covered with carved stones. “There’s a goat!” Or was it a wolf? I thought it was real before I became embarrassed by my mistake. Oh, how I wanted to be accepted. Liked. Loved.

Yet, we are all left behind and we all leave others behind. Intentionally and deliberately. Sometimes with love, sometimes for lack of love. Self-preservation can be a cruel need. It forgets that this leaving behind is never lasting, but a necessary part of the growth of the self before it discovers that there is no self. Division, another cruel trick of the mind searching for acceptance. Forgetting that the self divides only to someday return to the ever-flowing river that is Love.