Last night I had a dream I was laying down in my backyard. In this dream I was watching the trees as they swayed back and forth. In this dream you were fire-born; your hair had a streak of red as Polgara had a streak of white.
I had missed you.
You looked confused, searching, an overly young grandmother with Alzheimer’s; almost there but further away than I could ever imagine. Enkindled, I stood up and spoke. It was My Voice and I yelled. You looked at me, looked like you were looking for me too and said “Thank God I found you.”
In physics I learned that light and time slows near a black hole, and inside stops altogether. I imagined myself in a rocket ship looking out a window. Outside there was a black hole with spider-like black tentacles reaching out to pull everything in.
In a dream we walked into town and there was no one but us. We walked into the store to buy an ice cream cone but there was no one there so we couldn’t. I wanted to see you smile so bad that I told you it would be okay if we got it ourselves. We snuck behind the white-and-blue checkered counters where we didn’t belong and I was thrilled, I felt like a bandit. We found the cones and got a double scoop each. Mine was blue and pink, yours white and blue. You smiled. I smiled. We smiled. When we went to leave, we left behind a note explaining what we took and the money for the cones with a little extra so they wouldn’t be too mad. When I’m with you the world slows down and all there is, is you.
Sometimes a man will want to wrap his arms around a woman and believe she is the missing key he’s been searching for. It’s comforting even if it isn’t true, people are not keys and they cannot complete you. Sometimes when I screw up I want to explain everything away because everything has an explanation. It’s comforting even if it’s useless. I just don’t want you to hate me for my being me. I don’t know how to be anything else. We are flesh and bone and blood and limb and (ideas and mind and heart and…)…you are a woman. And that is all (and that is everything). You are not an empty space for me to put my metaphors into.
Someone once told me a story about small desert birds whose copulation is so frantic that sometimes they will throw themselves on thorns. They would cut themselves and bleed and die in a flaring ardour haze. Little lives dedicated to love in vain.
Last night I cooked for myself and did the dishes. I washed and stacked and dried off my hands on a white and blue dishrag. I listened to people talk about memories on youtube. I listened to a memory about a first kiss that tasted like tomatoes. As I dried I was so preoccupied with the idea of kisses tasting like tomatoes that I dropped a dish and it broke in half. When I picked it up and throw it away I remembered that an hour earlier I had eaten tomatoes off that plate.
Everything casts a shadow.
When I thought about black holes, I looked out of my rocket ship at the emptiness. I was both excited and afraid. I could sense it drawing me in and I knew that if I wanted to get away I had to turn the ship right away and blast off at full speed. Instead I just waited. I wanted to see what was on the other side. I wanted to be subsumed. I loved that darkness in the way certain dark things are meant to be loved; in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
In a dream your body told me that it has never been afraid.
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