I had a nightmare at age seven about a terrible illness that manifested as holes all over my hands and threatened to spread. In the dream my hands were in my lap as I watched the holes appear. Instead of seeing through the holes to the jeans on the other side, there was a deep, swirling darkness.
Later that year I stumbled though a field near my parents house and into a cave. As I entered the cave it began to spin. I looked toward the exit and it became a swirl.
My childhood mind often returned to explore the concept of emptiness and, to be more precise, nothingness. Though my life was just beginning I could not stop thinking about what would happen when I stopped thinking. If there was no more me and therefore no more thoughts, what was there?
I learned in elementary school about black holes. It’s what happens when a star dies, they said. One moment it is alive and full of energy and then it isn’t. Sometimes, they said, it happes so gradually as to barely be detectable. Other times, bang, supernova. The star collapses. The radiant and expansive becomes small and dense. Energy contracts, sinks inward and creates the hole.
I thought about nothingness and, sometimes, I became the nothingness. I’d snap out of it and tell myself not to do it again. I wondered why I went there and if it was normal. Did other kids go there, too?
As a teenager I took LSD in a school bus that was converted into a home. It was cold and clear as I stared at the night sky, amused by shooting stars and the movement of the galaxy. The stars were brighter than anything I’d ever seen and around them was the darkest of darkness. I looked at my hands. Like the sky, they would not stop shifting and changing. The lights in the sky flickered and the lines on my palms reached beyond my hands. The next day, at school and sleep deprived, I watched small black ants crawl over the chairs in my home room. As they moved they got larger and larger until they merged in to one black mass. I went to the bathroom, threw up and returned to see normal chairs and no more ants.
I don’t remember my own birth or what it felt like to experience light for the first time. But I do remember those of my children. It was pure alchemy. The ripped open is turned inside out to transformed one into two. Fear and pain mixed with love and hope and nothing became everything.
I remember my last night in that old city. The rain was pounding and, underneath, a dull and persistent drum. My toes were newly painted as I pressed on the brake in the darkness of the parking structure. My phone lit up and I noticed the name of a friend. I answered and heard an unexpected voice.
A woman with a thick and fake southern accent yelled into my ear. She said that she had my friend’s phone and had seen his texts to me. She told me that she had done her research and knew my story.
He was an actor who enjoyed improv. He and I had bonded over a shared interest in people named David. In that city this was a common theme as inhabitants found simple tethers to help keep them upright when the thick air bent them away from memories and the words that conjured them.
I heard my friend speak in the background as if tied to a chair. He told her to please stop. His voice was constrained while hers grew. I realized, suddenly, that she was him and he was her. He was the woman in my ear and she was the friend that I’d known but not known. His southern accent was much better than I would have expected it to be. He must have been practicing a lot over the years. I hung up the phone.
He texted me the next day that I should file a restraining order. That she was crazy and dangerous.
She texted me that she was coming for me and I should gather my cane and hobble away before it was too late.
I took stock and reminded myself that these two were one. They were warning me and coming for me at the same time. They wanted to hug me and they wanted to kill me and I wondered, how could this have happened? The red sky didn’t warn me. The air was still thick, as always.
I locked my door and slept with a kitchen knife that last night. In the morning I packed my bags and left. The man and the woman followed me, closing the city gates as I met the horizon. The drum sound slowly faded and I felt the air lighten. I took a new breath.
I woke up yesterday in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, clutching a soggy sweater, waves slapping my face.
I gathered my energy and paddled with my arms and kicked with my legs until I came to a nearby cable twice as thick as my torso. I wrapped around half of it and my feet slid back into the water.
Someone in a scuba mask touched my shoulder, their lips curled around a black tube. Water streamed down their face mask, obscuring their eyes. I climbed higher and higher on a cable until I could see out over part of the bay. It may have been a mirage but I swear that I spotted a whale.
And now I lay here in an empty room. Machines buzz at my head and a chair sits empty in one corner. I would like to know what happened but, in the meantime, I quietly feel all of the parts of my body still working. I can’t remember who should be sitting in that chair but I am sure that it will come to me soon.
After a while the door opens and my mom steps in. Behind her is my young daughter. They both smile as they sit on my bed. My daughter is excited to tell me about the best lunch she has ever had just now at some place down the street. The calamari was so good and so salty, she says. This makes me smile and the giant love I have for her pounds in my chest.
Later, when I am discharged, fully clothed, dry, and rested, my daughter and I settle back into our routine. I pack her lunch for kindergarten and stop at a coffee shop on my way to work, just as I did before. I drink coffee, work, come home and make us dinner. One day her dad calls to invite us to come see him. He lives in another city, in another state. We used to live there, too, but now we just visit sometimes. My daughter is excited to see him, he who she barely knows but loves dearly. I am excited, too.
On the plane my daughter wears sunglasses and carries an adult sized purse. An older man with white hair and money hands stares at us. He introduces himself and begins to ask a lot of questions while dropping hints about his successful wine business. I smile and nod while my daughter writes in her notebook.
While my daughter visits with her dad I spend time with old friends and revisit old habits. I meet a friend at a bar and I feel at home in the darkness. My friend steps out for a few minutes to buy some weed because he doesn’t really drink and would rather get high. I feel drops of water on my shoulder and turn around to see a man in a wetsuit standing behind me. He opens his mouth and out pours salt water in a stream. Another man, who has been sitting down the bar, gets up, shuts the spewing mouth and puts the man in a fish tank out back.
My rescuer wipes the seat next to me dry with a bar towel and sits down. He has a sarcastic and dark sense of humor and a half smile that makes my breath draw in deeper than I knew possible. When my friend returns he leaves soon after as I am wrapped in the arms of new conversation.
When we return from our trip it is no longer home. Home is back to that other city, in that other state. Home is closer to him. I call him GW, short for Guitar Wizard. This is one of our inside jokes. I have a shirt made and sent to him with “GW” written on it so that he will remember me. Two weeks later I quit my job and give notice to my landlord. I am in love and we move back.
We move in with my daughter’s dad. As roomates. It is the same house that he went to in secret, back when we were together, to visit his girlfriend. It is the same place where I took my two year old daughter by stroller to throw my dried our wedding bouquet on the doorstep after discovering his secret. The pain of the past now replaced by new life and a belly laugh at the turn of events.
The house is a broken mess full of leftovers from former roommates, girlfriends, mold and a food cart truck parked out front with a painted medusa head on the side. I no longer walk but float about as my dreams come true in the arms of GW.
As with my other dreams, this one eventually ends. One day, in his apartment, my mouth opens and out comes a judgmental comment about how he only has salt and pepper in his kitchen. I declare that an adult man should have more spices. This is the beginning of the end. I move on, righteous in my conviction that he should get it together and go spice shopping and come back to me only after he has a formidable selection.
It turns out that my heart is broken and I regret letting him go. Time passes and one day we meet up. We end up having sex. He tells me, as we lay together, that he is in another relationship and cannot see me again. I am distraught and send him away in anger. A few weeks later I am pregnant. When I tell him he assures me that he will give me money for the abortion. To get the cash I meet him at a corner near his apartment. My daughter is with me as I drive by, roll down my window and quickly grab an envelope from his hand as he stands at the curb. We drive away and I never see him again.
At the clinic the technician squirts lube on my belly and asks me if I would like to see the fetus. I turn my head and say no. I shut my eyes and listen to the sound of the machine, pulsing like the radar of a submarine. I go home, take the first pill and spend the day bleeding on my bathroom floor. It is my 35th birthday. The pipes in my old bathroom moan, echoing inside my empty gut. I recognize the sound as that of a lonely, lost whale down way too deep.
I think about my almost baby as I flush the toilet. The sun is out but I can only see deep red-black waves coming over me, crushing my flesh.
When I spotted you sunning yourself in the lap of that lizard I could not help but stare. The air was soft and thick like your famous chocolate chip cookies. Back then, before we met, I already felt their sweet aftertaste in my mouth.
I remember how you yelled when your feet burned on the hot sand while running from your pet to the ocean. I wanted a lizard, too, and tried to catch one as it ran by.
A turtle noticed my attempt and told me that my technique was all wrong. I listened to her stories and she listened to mine. I was especially interested in her gossip about your lizard.
The turtle and I went on and on while your lizard lounged nearby and you swam out to the island and back again.
I smiled at the turtle as you reached the shore and ran back to your lizard. You threw something towards me and it hit my cheek. It was the smallest piece of driftwood that the ocean could carve and was all it took for us to spend a lifetime on the beach, between lizard and turtle, always finding another excuse to stay.
I am in Philadelphia for the first time. I take a walk in an area full of founding fathers. There are shadow horses and ghost men in wigs with straight backs walking in lines between long rows of big box stores. The color of the bricks has not changed in 250 years but the land around is unrecognizable. I wonder if it is the history of the place that I feel in my body or if it is jet lag. I visit the Liberty Bell and feel awe when I see that it is much smaller than I had imagined, and its crack so large. How can something forged of metal have such a gash? I read about how many people have touched it or been photographed with it over the years and about its symbolic uses.
The crowd pushes me to the side and I make my way through a metal detector that funnels me into a courtyard between old brick buildings. There is a lonely sign in the middle of the cobblestone that lets me know that there is a talk at this spot every 30 minutes. I look up at a brick tower and wonder if there is still a bell up there. Broken bells go down in history and unbroken ones remind us that it is time for lunch.
As my eyes leave the tower and travel back to the ground I see a man in a park ranger uniform standing by the sign. I associate his look with mountains and trees, two things that don’t exist in this vast expanse of pavement and brick.
The man talks to a small group of three as I linger behind. He is full of facts about the constitution and about the many dramas that unfolded inside the nearby buildings. As he speaks of the long and important history of men debating, I notice that he is very familiar. He mentions that he is from California and then I remember how I know him. He is the Pink Floyd guy. He looks exactly the same, only older and with a small pony tail and a clean uniform in place of lop sided hair and a cigarette smelling once-white t-shirt.
He has the same crowded eyes. Like there is a whole town trying to look out of just one set. And his mouth is straight, unchanging no matter what words it forms. I dissect his features while going back into my mind to dig though old memories as he stands there, reciting facts and wearing a Smokey the Bear hat. Life comes into focus, now, like the moment a kaleidoscope’s pattern opens up before it closes again.
He would regularly visit the small town general store I cashiered at to buy cigarettes and 40-oz of the cheapest beer. I was 17 and found him deeply interesting. I wanted to know what was going on inside this man with nicotine fingers and a walkman. He was older than me by a handful of years. I could tell that he drank and smoked a lot but I didn’t yet understand what this meant.
One day, close to my high school graduation date, he waited for me after work. It was well past sunset as we drove west. I learned that his favorite band was Pink Floyd. I also learned that he believed that the world was about to end. He gave me the exact date. He was certain. He told me that there was a voice in his head that sounded like the Pink Floyd lead singer and this voice talked to him about important things. We parked next to a cliff that overlooked the ocean. The waves crashed below, water spraying up against the rock face every few seconds. He turned to me and said that the end of the world was happening all because of him. His eyes watered and his bony body sat rigid.
I listened and then drove him back to town and let him out on the side of a small road. He lit a cigarette and adjusted his headphones as he walked away.
Soon after, we met up again and drove out to a bluff overlooking the ocean. We walked through some scrubby grass in the dark and fumbled around for a few quick minutes, kissing and then laying down and then realizing whatever we were trying to do was not going to happen. I drove him back to my house. I let him out a few yards before the driveway and gave him instructions on where to hide out until I could retrieve him.
My parents were so worried about me that they had called the police. I’d never before seen them so upset at anyone other than each other. Eventually they went to bed and I went out to my room. It was in what had once been a storage room detached from the main house. I pulled him out of the darkness and through the sliding glass door. He lay stiff in my bed all night, not moving an inch. In the morning, he snuck out and hitchhiked down the rural roads to get back to wherever he lived.
My fascination with him broke after that night. I realized that his identity was the end of the world and mine was not. What he heard in Pink Floyd was not what I heard. His song was a broken bell and mine had not even been forged. A few months later I went off to college. The end of the world came and went and somehow he found his way across the country and into the national park service.
I think about lingering after his talk but the focus I felt a few minutes ago is now fading. I hear a bell ringing and realize that it is getting late. I walk away, wearing the sound between my ears, listening and feeling it speak to me until I fade away to join the other cobblestone shadows.
I am four and my grandparents have an object in their yard that looks like a spaceship. It is made of wood and wire with a pointed roof and stilted legs. I often climb inside, shut the door, peer out the wire and wait for take off. My grandparents have confirmed with me that it is most certainly a spaceship but my parents think it’s a birdcage.
I am a teenager. My grandparents sell their house and with it their mysterious ship. I don’t notice. I am occupied by thoughts of boys and grunge music and coffee shops. I am plagued by spirits and ghosts. I have so many frights in the day and in the night. When my chore is to shut in our chickens after sundown, I run and scream down the path through the woods to their cage, lock their door and run with breath held all the way back up. During the day I take walks though my parent’s property and surrounding areas. A dirt road and a creak run side by side through the yard. There are redwood trees and, under them, clover ground cover and thick cushions of redwood needles.
I wonder about spirits in the woods and worry why I can never spot a four leaf clover. One day, while walking through the dry creekbed, I see something moving out of the corner of my eye. I am so startled that I let out a blood curdling scream into the culvert that carries water but mostly just my feet from one side of the road to the other. I turn around and around, surprised at my voice, but nothing is there.
My parents have not taught me any particular religion or spiritual belief or practice and so my fears do not have a particular shape, but they are still very real. I eventually leave home for college, where I learn the difference between the old and new testament, the allegory of the cave and zen buddhism. I am hollow and hungry and lost. My sense of self is as easy to find as a ghost hovering in another dimension. My mind searches around the classrooms, in the library and on public transportation, intent to find what is missing.
I am a new college graduate and have decided that boys are the answer. I admire their minds, I tell myself. It is so much easier to connect with them than with girls my age. I occupy my time, which turns into countless years, shaping myself into what I think they want me to be. To what they see in me. I center their intelligence, interests and passions over mine. I stuff down my dreams when I realize that my talents are mediocre and dull in the shadow of their more important ones. I tell myself that I am progressive and smart because I am able to be friends with boys and then men and they want me because I am special. I believe that I have a power over them that most women don’t.
I am an adult now, there is no getting around it. I focus on every piece of evidence I can find to remind myself that men think that I am special and different and worthy of their company. I think that my mind is that of a man and not that of a woman. Women are uninteresting and just not relatable. Boring. I roll my eyes at the art of women and prefer male authors and song writers. My boyfriends have very particular interests and are happy when I mirror them. I do a lot of listening and happily wear the lingerie and heels given to me for valentines day because nothing says love like a plastic thong and blood filled heels.
I still believe that I am on course for a special place. I will know it when I arrive, I think.
I am no longer young and, now in midlife, catch myself in a window and see my mom. I jump head first into a secret relationship with no idea why, resulting in years of being used, manipulated and lied to. Wait, wasn’t I supposed to be the one in control? I am the one with the power over men and I have the upper hand, right? This illusion begins to crumble. I break open. All of my badges and trinkets and knowledge, tangled up wire and rusty nails, come pouring out and are absorbed into the earth.
I am on a long drive with my son. I begin to hear something. I ignore the sound but it returns a few minutes later. It sounds like a song. I pick up the phone and hear a sharp and low man’s voice introducing himself as a cop. His interrogation takes me all the way to a bank. I am holding my son’s hand and my daughter is behind us. The bank employees are all wearing ugly Christmas sweaters as they stand around an open vault. I see this and everything around me through a fun house mirror. I think that this must be a nightmare. Again, I notice a sound. It’s that cop voice. It has me like a hook. How did this happen?
My daughter shoves her phone into my face and I read: THIS IS A SCAM. The illusion melts. I end the call.
I walked past the open vault, holding my son’s hand while following my daughter, who guides us past the vault and into the day.
The ship has crashed and the pieces are scattered across the universe, each of them alone on a planet or moon. A rattlesnake slithers across the thirsty ground until I grab it and hang it from one remaining rusty nail.
The air is warm and full of plum tree petals. I am taking a circular walk around and around the blocks of my son’s elementary school. My headphones are in, the sky is bright and my mind consumed by a storyteller. In the middle of my second lap I realize that there is a person walking on the sidewalk about a half of a block behind me, neither gaining nor retreating and definitely not walking a dog. I notice myself noticing them. What is that feeling? It is familiar. I turn around and do a double take because it is him. He sees me see him and calls my name. I turn back around and yell,
leave me alone!
He responds,
please, I want to talk to you. Please stop. Stop, I want to talk to you.
I know this trick. He has done this so many times and, in the past, I fell for it.
In the past I would say,
fine, okay, what do you want to tell me?
I’d stop and look at him and he would look at me and he would say,
I just want to talk to you. I miss you.
I’d say,
what else is new? Didn’t I tell you that I am not interested in your tiresome story?
I am finally immune. I’d say,
unless you are going to tell me that you have stopped lying, that you are finally taking responsibility for your actions and will stop ruining my life?
Water
When I succumbed in the past and stopped to listen he would always say,
what do you want me to say? What do you want me to do? Why are you so mean?
Sometimes he would cry, like that time in the pouring rain when he cried and cried and I felt sorry for him, hugged him and couldn’t let go, stuck on to the tentacles protruding from his raincoat and drunk on poison. He would take my hand and tell me again that we have a special connection. I’d agree and smile, the rain turning into small rivers under our feet.
Fire
This time I started walking faster and shouting,
stop following me! What are you doing here? How did you find me? For fucks sake. Why are you following me? Leave me alone, go away, go away.
I faintly heard him call out that he happened to be driving by and spotted me and decided to stop. My chest is on fire and my face is burning with rage. I begin to run, find my car and hide inside until my son is done with basketball practice and we go home. I lock the door, make dinner and we play legos.
Earth
In my dream I walk down the carpeted stairs to my basement. The new floor is gone. In its place, a grave. A terrifying monster climbs out of the hole and into my basement and I scream like it is my last breath. I think,
how I could have built my house on the grave of such an evil spirit? I think about this as the monster reaches out for me.
I wake up to the sound of my cat breathing loudly. How does she make that noise? What a strange snorting bed hog, curled up contentedly and snuggling in the exact middle of the mattress.
I am craving a cinnamon roll. Ah, it was one of those nights. Once again I traveled the lit up highway of my brain to the world that reflects inside my eyes. I spend all night in the familiar place I visit while my body rests. This one is on the other side of my eyes and inside my cells. A smaller but equally cyclical world full of repetitive problems and sweet treats.
For some reason I have the belief from others or movies or books that dreams are metaphors providing one with clues about what they should do next. As a child my mom had a dream book on the family bookshelf. It was like a mysterious dictionary where the words translated into ghost-like apparitions that pointed in a direction that seemed solid but then crumbled upon a good stare. In my memory many of the definitions insinuated that my dream had something to do with sex, which I did not understand. Are my nightly cinnamon rolls trying to tell me something?
This dream book and countless friends and influences tell me that the mind is the all knowing wizard laying down artsy hints in the form of dreams for the dumb consciousness to follow. Or it’s like the super computer inside that is secretly optimized for happiness but is playing coy and holding back like an evil narrator.
At some point my mind started to serve me up a world complete with a sometimes haunted, sometimes perfect home and a city full of secret bakeries. It is as real of a place as this is and I have since spent countless nights on a break from my literal dream job looking for the most amazing underground bakery that my dream city has to offer. It is always the same, complete with a long line and a selection of yeasty treats waiting to be decided upon.
You walk down the street and the cold air is all that you feel and the moon is all that you see. You look to the right and into an open window with a nice mid-century lamp and a fireplace in view. You become an orange glow.
You float down to the next block and realize that this night walk is the only time you feel present all day. You took this walk in order to look for yourself. Until a few blocks in you have been surrounded by what you can only describe as a terrible sand storm shaped like your own head. You start to wonder if senses and feelings are the same thing. The cold on your face is an antidote to the hot heat of that earlier flash of anger and the moon a bright light to shrink the hopelessness you felt when brushing your teeth this morning.
It was only yesterday that you noticed the sandstorm that has been following you, getting stronger every day. You finally caught it in the mirror when you looked upside down and backwards. It is sneaky but you are learning. You wonder if this is what will kill you. You think that you should call your mom and ask her if she has one. If so, what the hell does she do to keep it from growing?
Your storm can be comfortable but it clouds your vision from seeing anything new. Everything yesterday and the day before you already did. You took those steps already and thought those things about that person already and made that judgment already and forgot your dreams already, just as always.
Your walk becomes longer and longer as you realize you can’t stop without risking death. You walk most of the night. Until your shoes rub your toes into blisters and the feeling of pain in your legs replaces the fear of stopping. You go home and get into bed and you do not wake up in the morning.
