For nights now my dreams are only of the water.
In one I’m in a swimming pool at night with other people and someone tells me there’s going to be a healing and the healer is none other than my father. I ask a woman in the pool how it’s going to happen and she looks surprised. She says big changes are coming and I can see that one of her eyes has already started changing, that a green crust has begun to cover one of her lids. My lover is in the pool and he swims over to me and then dives down, swimming like some plank fish over the top of me. He turns around and swims over me again.
In another dream I’m in the deep, darkest part of the ocean watching a big machine with a hook dip people into the sea, drowning them. It happens over and over and sometimes the hook dips even deeper, drowning the crane operator as well.
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During the day the dark slice is so tempting and it's all I can do to fight it; a thin curtain that so easily parts, beckoning me to a place I know too well. I’ll cut everyone off, that’s how I’ll show them. I’ll stop answering phones, won’t return emails or calls. I’ll say I’m busy and that will stop them because they’re busy too. This is how I’ll get away.
Tonight, after I’d read the story about the three orphans to the little one, after I’d gotten the hot water bottle for her and let her read herself to sleep in my bed, just as I was leaving the room, she said, mom, I don’t know what I’d do without you, and I said, because I had to, because you have to say this, I said, don’t worry; you’ll always have me. And then I turned out the lights and prepared for the sea.
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These are the fast and dirty ramblings of a woman who is barreling straight into her middle age. These writings come from the middle of her life, not a particularly bad time either. She’s not freaked out. She doesn’t sit on the couch all day watching soaps and fantasizing about a life completely out of reach.
9 comments:
What a writer you have become!
I dream about residing in new places, usually half-broken and semi-exposed.
sweet dweezila
welcome back
powerful sea dreams
love the imagery
the symbolism
snowsparkle drops by soon
maybe well share an oar
i love that you would prefer a bright and safe world for your child (question: would you truly prefer it for yourself???) and that yet you are willing to go to the sea. that's what the warrior's life is. grabbing for the light even as you walk towards the dark. have you read "the year of magical thinking" by joan didion? i think you'd like it. it's the same thing, although in her case the known world is having her husband alive, and the unknown world is that he dies right in the middle of a sentence while she's making dinner.
love you dweez. thanks for walking the far shore.
beautiful, haunting, precise, electric, hungry, and most of all alive alive alive. even when you have no idea about it, dweezila, you're absolutely gorgeous.
amazing and haunting - yes. The watery imagery. very ricj, and so much there. I knw you will dive even deeper,
xo
Steph
"He had never been a hypocrite, before becoming a father, and he still was not quite easy with it" -- or something like that -- one of my favorite lines from the Aubrey/Maturin books.
Like a lot of these lies we tell our children, though, it turns out to be truer in the long run than the cropped bare truths we tell ourselves, nicht?
Oof. This is moving, unsettling, real. It has the unfinished feel of life.
Dweezila, I want to stop at each piece to let you know how your writing moves me, but I don't want to stop reading.
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