Moments earlier, I lay half asleep, unsettled, caught up in a dream so familiar, a dream that was not a dream, a dream of something real, something that happened when I was 18 years old and still haunts me today.
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I had just started college. I was in pre-med, which was a mistake. Somehow, courses were assigned me. Biology, chemistry, calculus and Latin. Classes only two or three times a week. A light load, I thought. After all, in high school, I’d taken more subjects every day.
I quickly learned how wrong I was. Science and math were intense. Most of my classmates seemed so much better prepared than I was. Even Latin, a breeze in high school, was now a stretch. Translate The Iliad? Give me a break.
Yet something was missing. Hadn’t I also signed up for history? I was certain I had. That class was on the second floor of Alter Hall. Or maybe Albers Hall. At any rate, I was sure I had another course, and I was virtually certain it was history.
Soon I was overwhelmed by all that pre-med entailed. I was falling behind in math and science. Only in Latin was I keeping my head above water. And I was on a scholarship that required a B average. Crap.
Still, the idea of missing a class bothered me. Where was that history class again? As I walked the halls that first semester, I imagined slipping quietly into the back of a classroom for a lesson in history, hoping I still might be able to catch up.
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Somehow I muddled through a year of pre-med. Then I wisely changed my major to journalism.
I signed up for a history course as a sophomore. I liked it. I wondered if it was the course I was supposed to have taken a year earlier.
There was an easy way to find out. I could go to the registrar’s office and request a copy of my transcript. But just thinking about that made me anxious, being forced to remember all the time I’d spent wandering the halls, looking for my elusive history class, hoping I still might find it in time to catch up, to redeem myself.
I couldn’t bring myself to go to the registrar’s office. So I was left to wonder if I had ever really signed up for that class. I was left to dream about a class that I never attended and wake up gasping.
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Over the decades, I’ve often wondered if there was any truth to that dream.
But it doesn’t matter because I know that, regardless of whether I ever signed up for that history course, there will always be something, some task or expectation, where I’ve fallen short.
Falling short is my greatest fear, and it haunts me in my dreams in the form of a phantom class.