Quiet dreams last night. Dreams often surprise me.
They’re just you, babbling sense-memories and words, pulling the stories of your life apart and putting them back together, splashing around in your soul like a child in puddles after a rainy day.
And yet, sometimes there are new things that take you by surprise.
You can think you have yourself figured out, know what you want and how you feel, until your dreams look back and show you what a liar you are.
There was a song I remember, back in high school, and a girl. The girl was my idea of a tragic romance, or at least the image of her was.
The song blew into my life on the wind, the way songs do, and I drowned in it for days.
”Do you think of me / Do you dream of me / I always dream about you
Do you think of me / Do you dream of me / I always dream about you
Do you think of me / Do you dream of me / I al-ways drea-am about you”
I wanted so badly to dream about her, to feel the way about her it felt like the singer felt in the song.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
…
It’s hard to hold on to the exact memory. Even the dreams that stay with you, memory has a way of breaking down over time. The crucial colors fade, the emotions wobble and distort. And that’s the thing about dreams, nothing is true but the feelings.
Sometimes there’s a girl.
But there’s something else about her. All those subtle little things that define a person. Not just a girl, but someone specific, or part of the idea of one.
The answer to a relentless question. A shape inferred by an absence in my life, I suspect.
Not, to my deep and everlasting sorrow, someone I’ve ever actually met.
…
I thought… I don’t know, I have all these ideas about myself. Who I’m trying to be, who I want to be, who I think I’d want.
I know it’s a lie, in the quiet way I think you always have to know when you’re lying to yourself. I know there’s a part of myself I don’t talk about. I don’t think about. I keep far away from anyone else.
But she was there in a dream, just sitting next to me on a chair lift (why a chair lift, I don’t know). That’s it, just sitting close to me.
And she wasn’t a thunderstorm; she wasn’t etched in jagged lightning strikes, her voice wasn’t thunder, her gaze didn’t make the winds race and pick me up and throw me madly through the sky.
She wasn’t a calamity, a disaster, a tragedy. She wasn’t the breaking voice of mountains grinding themselves into dust. She wasn’t annihilating fire or overwhelming force.
She wasn’t all those things I expected because they’re powerful, they’re mad, they’re beautiful in their abandon.
It wasn’t the furious, irresistible force that seizes you up and murders your heart, and makes you glad for it. She wasn’t all the things I’ve come to expect from love.
Oh, but there was still terrible force behind that moment in the dream. She was just as fatal.
But she was quiet, and still. She moved by inches and there was no immediacy to it.
Gentle, like fresh-fallen snow, and calm like the moment the cold loses it’s bite, when warmth and numbness seeps in behind it, in the moments before freezing.
I want to say more. There should be more words. There was something… there was so much else.
But that’s the thing about dreams, I suppose.
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