And scornful Morpheus
Insomnia for the past week. Or more. Or less. I can't remember anymore.
It has gotten to the point where I can almost see, hear, smell the people who are not here. B. is in the bedroom that she slept in for less than a week, listening to Mozart and looking for pins. The Boy about to get into the shower- I could hear him open the bathroom door if it weren't for the water already running over me. My mother in the kitchen she has never seen and never been in, making tea. Jonathan Richman's voice not from my headphones but from the front entranceway. Raymond Carver and Eudora Welty trade off narrator's duties as I type even this. Their words are just on the next page of my book, the next screen I open. A. and M. are asleep, but when they were awake with me earlier I looked past them in an attempt to find the people I know are here.
In my dream this morning, dreamed when I wasn't fully asleep and I could tell that there was sun outside my windows, I was sitting on my Grandpa's old tartan couch in the green house he sold when he remarried. He was young in my dream, like my first memories of him. Before the Parkinsons when he was still himself, a cowboy, toothpick in the corner of his mouth and mud on his boots. Out to feed the cattle 4 times a week during the winter cursing and digging his truck out of the snow. Mending fence in the summer, barbed wire spooled out of a leather sack on his saddle, wire cutters through his belt. Teasing me because I was afraid of Ruby- c'mon girl, she ain't hardly 15 hands, smallest horse I ever owned, scared of a puny horse like that?
He was young, if mid-60s and healthy is young, but I was the age I am now, sitting there on his couch. We just sat there and talked. Made coffee, went down to the corner store (it closed 5 years ago) and got ice cream cones. I knew even as I slept that he was dead and there was no couch, no old green painted house, no corner store. I knew I missed him as I dreamed and we talked.
Now I feel like he's here too. Maybe having a cup of coffee and sneaking a cigarette (he quit really before I was born, but he'd still have one with his cousin at the cabin on a summer night before the cousin died- he died when I was 6 and I can't remember his name now) on the back porch. Maybe he is.
It has gotten to the point where I can almost see, hear, smell the people who are not here. B. is in the bedroom that she slept in for less than a week, listening to Mozart and looking for pins. The Boy about to get into the shower- I could hear him open the bathroom door if it weren't for the water already running over me. My mother in the kitchen she has never seen and never been in, making tea. Jonathan Richman's voice not from my headphones but from the front entranceway. Raymond Carver and Eudora Welty trade off narrator's duties as I type even this. Their words are just on the next page of my book, the next screen I open. A. and M. are asleep, but when they were awake with me earlier I looked past them in an attempt to find the people I know are here.
In my dream this morning, dreamed when I wasn't fully asleep and I could tell that there was sun outside my windows, I was sitting on my Grandpa's old tartan couch in the green house he sold when he remarried. He was young in my dream, like my first memories of him. Before the Parkinsons when he was still himself, a cowboy, toothpick in the corner of his mouth and mud on his boots. Out to feed the cattle 4 times a week during the winter cursing and digging his truck out of the snow. Mending fence in the summer, barbed wire spooled out of a leather sack on his saddle, wire cutters through his belt. Teasing me because I was afraid of Ruby- c'mon girl, she ain't hardly 15 hands, smallest horse I ever owned, scared of a puny horse like that?
He was young, if mid-60s and healthy is young, but I was the age I am now, sitting there on his couch. We just sat there and talked. Made coffee, went down to the corner store (it closed 5 years ago) and got ice cream cones. I knew even as I slept that he was dead and there was no couch, no old green painted house, no corner store. I knew I missed him as I dreamed and we talked.
Now I feel like he's here too. Maybe having a cup of coffee and sneaking a cigarette (he quit really before I was born, but he'd still have one with his cousin at the cabin on a summer night before the cousin died- he died when I was 6 and I can't remember his name now) on the back porch. Maybe he is.
posted by J at 11:51 PM
1 Comments:
I like those dreams.
My grandfather died six years ago but I still hear him channeled through people. You talk about Carver like he talked about Samuel Pepys, but less improbably.
(I will see you in less than a month omg omg.)
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