Azure, that was the color of the sky. Though I knew the very definition of the word azure was the blue color of the sky, I’d never actually used or thought the word before, certainly never felt that any blue was as clear and brilliant as the blue that stretched like an unbroken ocean above our heads. Azure, breathtaking azure.
The ground beneath my feet was firm and flat and covered in grass. It added a spring to my stride as I ran, my bare legs long and muscled, pistons comfortably firing beneath me, used to this loping, this covering ground in great leaps. Young again. Oh yes, another dream of being young again.
Part of the dream was the awareness that it was a dream. Simple clues explained this to my sleeping brain. While my hair had once been as long and thick as the braid bouncing against my back, my legs had never been this long and fit, had never run any distance with ease. I’d never been a runner, never even tried, and so the endorphins I imagined I felt were just that, imagined not remembered, but nonetheless very pleasant.
Too, there was the man running beside me. If I was in my early twenties, he was in his more impossible mid-thirties. I never knew him at that age. When I was born my father was already there. My first real memory of noticing his age, he was in his mid-forties by then. Not to mention, this man, this reimagined father of mine, was, like me taller and more fit than in reality. Beautiful as my father had been in the black and white pictures taken in his youth, this was my father’s face on an athlete’s body, his easy smile and matinee idol’s confidence someone completely other than the emotionally complicated father I grew up with, the desperate depressed octogenarian I know now.
But always, when I catch a dream unfolding, I make a decision. Though the real nightmares are hard to control, if it is one of those ridiculous stress dreams, upon awareness I can usually end them.
-
I cannot count the number of times I’ve had Godzilla-Mommies
come into my house at night to continue the insanity they unleashed
from the other side of my desk during the day.
The what-are-YOU-going-to-do-about-this’s,
the see-that-you-do’s,
and the I’ll-have-your-job-over-this’s barge in,
leaning their ridiculously inflated heads down over me
and yell so shrilly I am amazed that my tenant doesn’t join in the chorus of anger,
banging on our common wall,
screaming for me to pipe down and stop waking her now-crying baby.
That’s the unreality point that pulls me out of the dream and lets me take control,
the realization that I’d never allow anything to get loud enough to disturb my tenant.
With the full impunity that accompanies realized dream actions,
I look up at this one of many Monster Mommies and stop her in her tracks.
Sometimes I tell her exactly what I think of her.
Sometimes I mirror her tone and amp up her volume.
Sometimes, amazingly empowered to drop the verbal bomb I would never use in reality,
I actually just tell her to F-off,
and, oh how incredibly nice it is to end the dream by my choice,
with my last word and no consequences
for acting the way a normal person would if she simply didn’t care about keeping the job. -
When the dream is good, though,
when I catch a dream that makes me feel so good,
so happy, so much more than I ever feel in reality,
oh those are the ones I grab hold of and ride for as long as I can.
So we ran, my pseudo-father and I, long legs perfectly matched, running machines, at ease with our bodies and each other. We didn’t talk, didn’t need to. Laugh though, that we did, because it was just so marvelous for us both, to move freely, to run, to flow across the wide green land under the wider blue sky, to be young and comfortable in our skins, happy each for the other’s company and good health. Lovely dream. We just ran.
I held on to the dream as long as I could. There’s no telling how long we ran in the dream or how long I held the dream alive inside my head. If I’d had the ability to continue indefinitely I think I’d be dreaming the dream still.
But I don’t have the ability and so eventually I began to feel the familiar ache in my back. I put a hand out to him, touching his shoulder and we slowed, then stopped.
“Goodbye, Papa.” I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “I love you.”
My father’s ice-blue eyes crinkled above his soft smile. With a playful tug on my braid, he echoed the phrase he can never say in reality.
.........
I woke up, sitting in the blue paisley recliner, fluffy cat in my lap, and reached for the pills on the table beside me.
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