Practice Dreaming
On Victoria Day at Eastwood Park, the neighborhood kids lit sparklers and ran around in circles. From their cries and grassy thrashing, they sounded like they were moving quickly, but as we walked away from them they hardly looked like they were moving at all. I noted this oddity aloud as you walked with your chin down, contemplative. It was hot out, little wind, my armpits wet. June bugs clattered; crickets chirred; nightbirds made music from branches unseen. “I could use a drink,” I said. “You can always use a drink,” you said, glancing quickly. The hissing of sparklers receded.
I do not always understand you. Is this my failing, or yours? The heaviness I sensed in you that night walking home from Eastwood Park became a storm cloud menacing our delicate balance. Love is more than quaint formality, courtesy, passion, laughter, loveliness, magic, all things awash in perfumed talc and jewels, it is a practice, like playing an instrument, like practicing to play one. “I dreamt that dream again,” you said the morning after. I had slept off the whisky on the davenport, gentled by the lullaby of low-flying jets, or was it the roar of distant lions?
Brush, polish, spit. My face looked like weathered flesh tone paint in the mirror. And glass flew all over the bathroom floor. I should have got down on my knees and thanked God you had not crushed me yet. But irony befits the man I have become; break me with a fork and watch me ooze. “What are you doing in there?” you asked from beyond the door, your voice a growing lobster, clacking for answers. “When I’m pushing up posies,” I said, “you’ll be glad to ride a bicycle built for two with the X-ray of a man.”
“What does it all mean?” you asked over French toast, Toulouse sausages, and maple syrup from Quebec. Sunlight streamed through the soft kitchen window, lighting up your face and filling my empty coffee cup. “Nothing to worry about,” I said and touched your cheek, a gesture that once meant I am being tender with you, please reciprocate, but now it sought to verify your actuality. “The events of our lives form parts,” I said, “or scenes if not chapters of a longer, ongoing story.” But what I really thought was that the empirical world, while seeming real, wasn’t quite that.
I woke up once or twice that night and by the glow of lamplight saw your sleeping face. Your eyes flinched under your lids, and I thought, Where do you go in your sleep? And then it occurred to me that even had you told me where you went in great detail, I’d no more understand you then than I do now. The morning sun flooded the bedroom like lemon paint, and I woke up sticky with a splitting headache and waited for a moment to lift your veil of sleep and ask you if you ever dreamed of me.