Dreams

I slept poorly last night because of the dreams. Dreams of the sort that don't even make sense in the morning. Dreams whose depths I surfaced from after a long struggle in open water. Dreams whose content I couldn't describe to you in any detail at all. It is like trying to catch thin strands of light in the webbing between your fingers. And each time as I finally breached from the broken strands of sleep I'd breathe in deeply, feel the small of my back against the curve of the mattress, the u shape of the pillow around my head. I'd remind myself that whatever had been happening in the dream wasn't real, that what was real was the dark, the bulky mass of the mirror on the wall, my even breathing. I was home.

I'm not at all certain how hopes and dreams came to be tied one another. When I quizzed S on her dreams she mentioned one about needing to chop a person into a bunch of different pieces. She wasn't sure what for, but it's safe to assume it wasn't for the person's benefit. So, why dreams? Dreams are perverse and strange things. They seem to have very little to do with hope. In less that hope is that one day a person will become a human butcher, which, Fried Green Tomatoes aside, a person could probably do better.

It was raining. I took off my coat and swam through the streets. The fog was in, and I was wearing an old shirt my father had given me. Women in distant windows called down to me from above, promising the pipe and dreams of the sort that I could never have imagined. At first, when you're swimming through the dark, you feel odd, as though one shouldn't back stroke across Main Street, that it isn't proper. But you get used to it after a while. And soon you don't understand why everyone doesn't swim through the shadows in the middle of the night. Underneath a small stone bridge that connected one crappy area to another equally crappy area, a group of us were gathered around a fire telling stories about the other dreams we'd had, of flight, of mothers, death, the loss of a loved one, and when it came my turn to speak I told them this dream:

She appeared on the side of the road, standing in the gravel, in a streak of headlights. It was mid-summer, the rain was warm, and the cicada’s were buzzing in the jack pines. I remember hoping desperately that I did not seem insane.

“Looking for a ride?” I asked, and I was certain that I should have just said, “Hop in,” and that she would think that I was going to cut her into little pieces and mail her across the continental United States.

Rain ran smoothly down her face and hung from her thick top lip. She had blond hair, and skinny white legs. She looked up the road at the stream of headlights coming her way. “As long as you promise not to do anything funny.” She said.

I laughed, which wasn’t funny at all, and I was afraid she’d step back into the night, the pines, and the rain from which she’d appeared. She was beautiful. I remember thinking that if God existed, she would step into my car, and I asked Him if I could have this one thing, on the lonely drive to my mother’s funeral.

“Are you starting to understand?” I ask, you as the car rolls by Paw-Paw and onward on this lonely stretch of road. The rolling hills pillowed softly by the mothering clouds.
She had a distant look in her eyes, like she was from Atlantis, a place my mother had read about to me as a child. I told her that I was driving to my mother’s funeral, and her face grew a bit distant and pinched as if she was smoking a cigarette.

What a strange question for a highway girl to ask someone she had just met. She turned to me, her green eyes so intent, so close, and I wanted to capture the whole of the ocean in a single bottle, to lay it at her feet. I said, “It is not an easy thing, this living.” She smiled and played with the cigarette lighter.

“That’s what I’ve gathered,” She answered, her words, like her, sweet and wet. And as you sigh, and relax into the cushion of the seat, I think that’s all I’ve ever been looking for, the mystery between two people.