"Cary Grant Was My Companion, Until He Wasn’t"

The Door Wasn’t Locked, But He Knocked Anyway

Dreams are strange. They borrow faces, rearrange timelines, and whisper truths we’re not ready to hear. Sometimes I wake up clinging to them. Other times, I’m grateful to be free—like that Bobby Ewing twist on Dallas, which I never watched but somehow absorbed through cultural osmosis. JR was the villain of the decade. That was decades ago.

This dream wasn’t disturbing, just…off-kilter. I should’ve known I was dreaming. The faces kept changing. First, I was on a plane. Then a train. Cary Grant was in my car—yes, my train car—wearing a purple shirt, walking that unmistakable walk. I’d just watched Notorious again, mostly to fall asleep. His voice had become a kind of lullaby.

I wonder if Cary Grant lives in my subconscious now. Not as a movie star, but as a symbol. Of elegance? Escape? Maybe just the comfort of a familiar voice when the world feels too loud.

We were heading to San Francisco. The landscape outside was Utah—red and blonde earth, monument-like mountains. I don’t know where we departed from. That’s how dreams work. Cary was telling me Hollywood stories, making me laugh. He looked older, but not aged. Just…Cary Grant.

Then he wasn’t. He became someone else—a friend I met in Florence, SC. Still Cary Grant, but now not. A face borrowed by my subconscious. A restaurant owner I used to know. Then back to Cary again, as the train rolled on.

I think about how memory plays dress-up in dreams. How people we’ve known slip into other roles. Maybe it’s not confusion. Maybe it’s the mind trying to reconcile unfinished conversations.

Suddenly, I was in San Francisco. My old apartment on Dolores Street. Richard and Sean from the third floor were performing some bizarre reality show in tall hats, looking like gay clowns. Richard pulled me aside, smug. He reminded me—bragged, really—that my relationship with the German lover he hated lasted only six months. So you see the difference, he said in that grated nasal voice that always irritated my German lover.

I didn’t want to remember. Not with Sean nearby. But Sean didn’t care that I had an affair with Richard when I was with the German lover because I let myself be seduced. He said their open relationship was why it lasted. Mine didn’t because I lived in secret, in lies. I hear it echo: We’re in an open relationship. Over and over.
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And then panic. I’d left everything on the train—camera, phone, laptop. I twisted in bed, frantic. And then I woke up. Furious. Relieved. My phone was on the nightstand. My laptop, closed. Nothing was gone.
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It was all just a dream except parts of it wasn't.

“He Looked Like a Secret You’d Already Told.”