Dreams and the Things I've Learned From Them

This piece originally appeared on Everyone Except You in August 2018.

I’m sitting on the bed, and my babe is smiling wide, face lined in a thin sweat, leaning over from where he’s standing to check if I’m okay. I think I am, until I see his face: it’s so warm and full of energy that little bits of shine ooze out of him. The burning bits wink at me as they poke out from his face, his shoulders, his torso, his hands. I used to see everyone I loved in my dreams with little pieces of light floating around them, like embers lifting off from a fireplace and floating through the breeze. Babe is telling me a story, some old story about the people he loves most in the world, but I can’t even listen to the story, because all I can focus on is that the more he talks, the more those little shards of light start to dance around him like confetti; the more excited he gets, the more they start to bounce off of each other like atoms in warm water. 

I try to focus on the pure eagerness of his expression, eyes glinting with joy for the life we share, with a careful care of how we’re going to share it. But suddenly his face ages before my eyes, from smooth skinned and shiny, with a thick black beard flowing like a wave across his chin, to creased and settled, with a beard so gray and crinkled I could snap a piece off. In the rapid fire transition, I see his life, and our life; implicitly I understand the silver beard preempts his inevitable death - that’s when my body floods to the top and spills over and I wake up. 

lessons: time is slipping out of my hands like water. I will lose him. fires burn out; magic is ephemeral and that’s why it’s magic.

My two best and loveliest friends and I, looking our best and loveliest, wandering around a carpeted Vegas casino. They’re all carpeted, but this one has a carpet that is fifty seven different colors and somewhat cushy, so we walk around on it holding our shoes. We are not lost but not going anywhere in particular. My one friend, E, my sweet roommate, is crying and crying, she just can’t help but feel that everyone we were with didn’t have a good time tonight. My other love, X and I, rub her back and dismiss her fears, but she can’t shake it, the feeling that the people she loves might be miserable. X and I start to laugh, just at how wonderful and purely good E is, how much she cares about what’s going on with the feelings of people she cares about. We’re still laughing when three men get off the elevator just ahead of us. We’re on our way towards them but as soon as we see them, they look as ready to pounce as as a pack of panthers stalking out a family of gazelles. We backtrack, stunned by their boldness; they are suddenly familiar. Can you have deja vu in dreams or just about dreams? It’s like they’re from a part of the dream that I’ve forgotten already - part of the dream that twisted into a nightmare and then promptly fell out of my brain. I simply can’t remember if I’ve seen them before, but it doesn’t matter because E and X are fleeing, just like me, they feel the urgency. The men are yelling after us, we don’t need to hear what they’re saying to know we need to run faster. The men are laughing, but I can’t tell what kind of laugh it is: maniacal and angry, or poking fun at our  reaction. I spot a women’s restroom and we sprint inside, still barefoot; our echoed voices let us know we are the only ones in here, and maybe anywhere. When the door rests to a heavy close, I yell at “THIS IS A SAFE SPACE” and now it’s us who are laughing at ourselves, but it’s only now that we can laugh like this - we’re so relieved. I feel so much better here I can’t stand it, and I want to make sure my loves do too, so I keep reminding them how safe we are and they keep laughing and laughing. It’s the only thing I can do, make them laugh, so I keep doing that. I’m still reveling in the tears rolling down their cheeks when I wake up. 

lesson: everyone is probably the best version of who they are. we should seek out spaces that at least feel safe. the only thing I’m interested in doing is making people laugh, so that they feel better. 

I’m out, with some faceless friends, at a club. I don’t always want to be at clubs, but I do tonight, I’m actually pretty excited to be here and just bop around. About when I realize this is when I see him, looking just like himself.  

Its not him, it’s not. I know this because he died several months ago. But from the back, I can see his partially shaved but still curly black hair, thick black glasses, trendy-colorful button down. And that same way about him.  He’s scanning the room for what’s out there with a gentle coolness tied to an aggressive confidence that all together comes off as completely chill, but which I now know is rooted in deep seated, good old fashioned terror. Of the world, and his place in it.

As we dance in a circle of sweaty bodies, I can see him or feel him; he’s always just out of the corner of my eye, even when I am actively trying not to see him. 

Is it him? I start to question if maybe I somehow got this wrong. He’s been alive this whole time, what a huge misunderstanding. What a relief to know I don’t have to feel so fucking guilty.  

My group of gals is circling closer and closer to his crew, I am practically brushing up against him. I can feel simply that I’m around him. I can’t tell if he can feel me near him, too. We both keeping looking at the floor, dancing and jostling such that our points of view adjust ever so slightly away from direct eye contact with each other, sipping from our drinks in between head bobs, never glancing over when the other is. 

I want to run away from there, out of the club and out onto the streets but more than that I want him to look me in the eyes. I want him to grab my hand and pull me into the corner and tell me the whole thing, how he was going through some weird shit at the time, but he’s alive, he never killed himself and he never wanted to.  

But as soon as I shake myself of this, he pulls a girl from my circle into his embrace. They’re dancing and yelling into each other’s ears and sipping out of each other’s straws. I am now pretty sure he can feel me staring. He can feel me too, right? This is when I decide to see his face, and really see it. I let myself see that it’s not him. And then I wake up. 

lessons:  your mind chooses to see what it wants to see. what’s important about the story is the part you decide to focus on. we think about the dead a great deal more than they think about us.

 My body is normal on the surface - you wouldn’t be able to tell just looking at it that anything is wrong. But on the inside of me, where my bones should be, there is constructed an intricate architecture of microscopic tinker toys, delicate building blocks fused and latched and bolted together, so that what’s holding my body together looks less like bones and more like detailed lattice work on a French quarter style home, a framework that keeps my limbs and extremeties locked in a straightjacket-like tension. I feel if I moved at all, my entire being would shatter into a billion tiny white shards. One touch and I’d collapse, raining sharp white sand. 

I want so badly to lash out, to break out of my delicately fragile bone cage with physical force. Instead I just take one breath in. My lungs fill with air, and the structure starts to rattle against its own rust. The metal screeches against itself in restraint, but as I breathe out, the hardened deposits that were holding my self together melt and bleed out of my pores. Now semi-solid like molten rock, the oozing structure floods my joints and surrounds my tendons, loosening any remaining brackets, unhinging rusty latches, and bursting open levys that were keeping its rigidity intact. I am left in a puddle of easiness and squishy flesh and life, with only a metallic taste left on my tongue.

lesson: give up control to things you can’t. fucking breathe. everything is temporary.