I wake up every night now from a dream.
In my dreams, she's alive again. She's not covered in bruises or broken like a china doll. No, none of that happens there. It's like what I saw was a jagged shot film, done in the sixties to try to gain renound, too pretentious to make sense of. Everything was grainy and too detailed, in negative and running at the wrong speed. Surreal, in an entirely unneccisary way.
Just the same, although it feels more real than reality when I live in this dream, I know that's all it is. Everything's too hazy, like a movie set of fall. You know it isn't real. Even though it feels real, it isn't.
In my dream, it's tuesday. It's always tuesday in my mind, a sort of generic day. Not the begining of the week, not the end..no special activities on a tuesday. Thursday, you can at least say the week is nearly over.
It's tuesday in July, and for some reason the leaves are falling off the trees. But this seems real. I'm walking away from school, kicking through piles of red and gray leaves on the sidewalk. I'm wearing something I would never wear, especially if the leaves were coming off the trees, and carrying my books slung over my shoulder.
Somewhere far off my brain takes what I guess is the compolation of those two seasons and begins to send me swimming in the smells, making it even more real. Decaying leaves melting down together with some sort of cookout. Probably tuna, or maybe eel. I can't tell from where I am on the sidewalk. From the shadows in my dream, time keeps changing between noon and five o'clock at night. The air's lukewarm, cold, hot...it fluctuates. I sometimes think that maybe it's just the tempurature under my blankets. And sometimes I think it might mean something.
Up ahead, at the stoplight that's always yellow to match the washed out colours of the dream world, I can see her crossing the street. Although I know she's dead, suddenly this version of myself thinks that maybe the grainy washed out dark alleyway was all a dream, and she still is alive. So I start to run, having this sudden revelation that I was asleep the entire time.
The pavement under my feet is uneven, and has cracks and pebbles, and is far more real than reality's pavement. I take no notice in the real world, but here every detail is magnified to clog up my senses. She begins to turn a corner as i come up behind her, bag in one hand now and shoes scuffing the sidewalk. I can see the back of her head, where her hair is cropped short. Of course we're both angular and misshapen but that's normal - we're teens.
I call out to her, and she turns around, blank expression as usual. I realize that even in the dream she can't interact with people on the same level that even I can. She asks me what I want as we regain footing on the sidewalk opposite the crossing, and I don't have an answer. And since we live in different places, we split up.
After I wake up, I begin to cry. I don't understand that part, the crying. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't be blaming myself for her death, as I wasn't even there when it happened. I was just the first one on the inside to find out about it.
Lying awake in bed, staring up at the patched ceiling and listening to the hum of a refrigerator as its compressor clicks on, I choke on my own emotion and wonder.
I have this dream, where we're walking, and she's alive. Like she had never died at all.
It's like a bad rerun.
In my dreams, she's alive again. She's not covered in bruises or broken like a china doll. No, none of that happens there. It's like what I saw was a jagged shot film, done in the sixties to try to gain renound, too pretentious to make sense of. Everything was grainy and too detailed, in negative and running at the wrong speed. Surreal, in an entirely unneccisary way.
Just the same, although it feels more real than reality when I live in this dream, I know that's all it is. Everything's too hazy, like a movie set of fall. You know it isn't real. Even though it feels real, it isn't.
In my dream, it's tuesday. It's always tuesday in my mind, a sort of generic day. Not the begining of the week, not the end..no special activities on a tuesday. Thursday, you can at least say the week is nearly over.
It's tuesday in July, and for some reason the leaves are falling off the trees. But this seems real. I'm walking away from school, kicking through piles of red and gray leaves on the sidewalk. I'm wearing something I would never wear, especially if the leaves were coming off the trees, and carrying my books slung over my shoulder.
Somewhere far off my brain takes what I guess is the compolation of those two seasons and begins to send me swimming in the smells, making it even more real. Decaying leaves melting down together with some sort of cookout. Probably tuna, or maybe eel. I can't tell from where I am on the sidewalk. From the shadows in my dream, time keeps changing between noon and five o'clock at night. The air's lukewarm, cold, hot...it fluctuates. I sometimes think that maybe it's just the tempurature under my blankets. And sometimes I think it might mean something.
Up ahead, at the stoplight that's always yellow to match the washed out colours of the dream world, I can see her crossing the street. Although I know she's dead, suddenly this version of myself thinks that maybe the grainy washed out dark alleyway was all a dream, and she still is alive. So I start to run, having this sudden revelation that I was asleep the entire time.
The pavement under my feet is uneven, and has cracks and pebbles, and is far more real than reality's pavement. I take no notice in the real world, but here every detail is magnified to clog up my senses. She begins to turn a corner as i come up behind her, bag in one hand now and shoes scuffing the sidewalk. I can see the back of her head, where her hair is cropped short. Of course we're both angular and misshapen but that's normal - we're teens.
I call out to her, and she turns around, blank expression as usual. I realize that even in the dream she can't interact with people on the same level that even I can. She asks me what I want as we regain footing on the sidewalk opposite the crossing, and I don't have an answer. And since we live in different places, we split up.
After I wake up, I begin to cry. I don't understand that part, the crying. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't be blaming myself for her death, as I wasn't even there when it happened. I was just the first one on the inside to find out about it.
Lying awake in bed, staring up at the patched ceiling and listening to the hum of a refrigerator as its compressor clicks on, I choke on my own emotion and wonder.
I have this dream, where we're walking, and she's alive. Like she had never died at all.
It's like a bad rerun.
