Dream Sweet

Here you are, awake. You can tell by the way the steam from your tea hits your face while you sit, stirring, at the table. It’s the mint kind, which is good but not as good as the chamomile, which is not as good as the sleepytime—you finished both last week. You chose your nice teacup, almost too lovely to touch, but you trace over the delicate floral print anyway, the tips of your fingers burning.

You think you’ve never been so awake. 

You think it isn’t so bad because the yellow of the overhead kitchen light makes you feel like you’re at a diner with friends, or on the subway coming home from a party, and you can make a life for yourself out of stories like that.

You think that this is just like lunch time when you were sitting right here with your dry sandwich, considering for the millionth time the people on the night side of the Earth. You whispered trans-pacific reassurances to those of them who were hearing the birds’ first chirping, so much earlier than they’d expected. You wouldn’t believe it but, here, they start around 3:30 a.m. What an awful thing, to be awake in the hours for sleeping, robbing birds of their best-kept secrets. One calls from outside your window, and you remember the reassurances for yourself. There will be other nights, other sleeps, other dreams. Maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow… And the mantra reminds you of love long deferred. Of your own love, you think, of a love you had, or maybe didn’t have. Or maybe it was a love you lost. 

But you can’t seem to remember if you were falling into love or out of it. Maybe you were just falling into bed. Or else it’s that line of writing you’re always getting stuck in your head. The one from your favorite novel. Or is it your mother’s favorite song? If I should fall from grace with god… Song feels closer but you can’t sing it because you couldn’t begin to remember the tune. You have a beat. Simple, like the one inside your chest but it comes in threes instead of twos, 

and you think it puts you, finally, to sleep, but the thought is interrupted by 
three. 
sharp.
knocks.

And before you know it you’re speaking with your best friend who’s come all the way to your front door which is missing a hinge so it opens up instead of out, and that alone is strange enough that you don’t think to wonder why your preschool best friend, with his dinosaur backpack and velcro shoes, is visiting you at your apartment for 22-year-olds. You’re too busy wondering why the paint is melting off the walls, but every time you have that thought, every time you try to look, the paint re-dries. You offer him a seat on the floor, at the coffee table, and serve him lemonade from your grandmother’s china teapot that you broke last year. 

And you tell him you’re happy to see him, you are, but wasn’t the traffic just terrible? And you tell him it’s been an age and there’s so much to say, but you don’t quite know where to begin. And you tell him about school and work and the books that you like and the people you don’t, and there go the walls again, almost.

And you tell him the tale of two shitty dates you went on before you found the Love Of Your Life. “And that wasn’t right either,” you say, “but at least it wasn’t my fault.”

It was the worst of times? You nod. “It’s been the worst of times.”

The walls fall away with a splash into the pool of paint on the floor to reveal a pink sky filled with suns smaller than moons and black holes smaller than the palm of your hand and, of course, clocks: hanging in midair, like a Dalí. They’re stopped. Their second hands flicker and waver. A dream? but you shake your head. “Sometimes the power just goes,” you tell him, but it’s difficult to make out his face, even up close. You catch an eye, an upper lip, maybe a smile line, but the whole picture never comes together.

“I used to tell my mother I loved you,” your words drop onto the table in front of him, bouncing a time or two. He scoops the statement up in his hands like water and checks his reflection in it, practices his smile, distracted. He says nothing of your confession, but maybe he just didn’t hear you. School pictures always got the better of me, you know? And before you can tell him you do, it’s his turn, and the teacher ushers him over to the stool behind the white sheet. There’s a countdown to the camera shutter before he falls lifeless to the floor. Nobody screams. 

The clocks are replaced by kids hanging lifeless, practiced smiles plastered to small faces, and nobody screams.

You’re up next so you sit pretty with your hands in your lap and the photographer has to raise the camera to meet your eyes, tall as you are these days. “I said it to make her happy.” Your mother? You nod, and he looks sadly at you—feels badly for you, you think—and he holds up three fingers, one at a time. Click, and down you go too. You fall through your friend’s body, through the floor, through nothing. You fall for hours. At the bottom, you look up through the miles of darkness to find your mother’s small face peering at you from the opening. Her mouth is a small crooked frown, and then, Have you seen my mother’s teapot?

A drop falls from the sky onto your cheek and you want to tell her “it wasn’t my fault” but the words stop just two feet above your head. She cries like rain, and there’s nothing left, so you cry too. You cry like you’ve never cried, and you begin to lose sight of your crying self, so apart from a you that you recognize that you might as well be someone else entirely. 

Or maybe not someone else entirely. It’s more like you once-removed. Like a painting of you, the kind they hang in the modern wing of that museum next to the school back home so you can puzzle over it for a while before you settle for feeling sorry that you don’t understand. You lean in to read the plaque on the wall: TWO CRY TOGETHER FOR A TEAPOT, AND FOR TIME THEY FORGOT TO SPEND TOGETHER. 

Oil on canvas, your date reads and she tells you what she thinks the painting means, but you’re not so sure because you decided at least two rooms ago that she wasn’t the One for You. The impressionist gallery is next and it’s empty, save for a guard and a single portrait on the far wall, a Cassatt: a mother bathing her child’s feet looks up at you to say, It’s time. Go let her down gently. 

The painting stills, and your date reappears at your side. You rest your head on her shoulder; she is too good for you. She seems to sigh, If you love me, let me know, and you finally face her to find only acrylic, painted in uncertain lines, not yet dry and entirely changeable. You caress her cheek, and your thumb leaves a line in her face like a brushstroke. It disrupts the circles she drew this morning when she rubbed the sleep out of her expression, and she is not good enough. You look sadly at her—feel badly for her, you think—and you’re still having trouble with faces but you manage to piece together a pair of hopeful eyes. It’s closing time at the museum.

The curator smiles at you when you walk out alone and, for a moment, you think you might love her. She hands you a complimentary greeting card with a print of the piece you were staring at earlier, and you open it to find her phone number scrawled above the card’s message: WISH YOU WEREN’T HERE. You laugh, and she laughs, and you know you won’t call her. 

At home in your kitchen—but not yours exactly, it’s a different kitchen from a different time—you take your favorite book out to thaw and replace it with the misprinted note. You have a freezer full of cards full of good intentions: an icy library with WISH YOU WEREN’T HERE stuck between THINKING OF ME and MISSING YOU SOMETIMES, and it’s frosted over with numbers you never dialed of girls you let down gently.

You’d nearly forgotten it was your turn to host, and you turn to find your kitchen overflowing with everyone you’ve ever known. They spill out into your living room, and beyond, and they’re waiting for a story. You parse the thawing book, scanning over excerpts from your favorite novels, lines from your favorite songs, little words and phrases you’ve collected over the years from all sorts of people, real and imagined, until finally, you land. 

“And so we were not God’s final creation, but rather, second to the tide,” you pause to gauge reactions but there are none. Only practiced smiles plastered to small faces. “When God caught his own reflection in the unmoving oceans of his newly-finished earth, so startled was he, so ashamed at what he saw that he batted the world away with his hand. It tipped on its edge and fell back again, sending the very first waves crashing to shore.” 

Shouldn’t the waves have settled by now? You look in the direction of the question, and you see your preschool best friend sitting with his class on your living room floor, older now. You nod the smallest nod. “And likely, they would have, were it not for you and me, created in His image. Let us pray.” The congregation bows their heads, and then, I am your mother, your daughter, your lover, your friend… and thou shalt have no other Love before Me. 

O God, my God, this is all your fault. 

Water drips from the book’s binding. It’s forming a puddle at your feet that rises up to your knees, your waist, your neck. Through the rug, it warps the hardwood. You’re drowning in it. You kick off your shoes, but it’s not enough. You are determined to live and to see the sky, so you strip away your clothes. They drag on your shoulders and you claw at the water until your hand grips around something more or less solid. As you pull your head above the ocean, coughing and crawling and clinging to the sand, you see that it is an ankle. It belongs to a young girl, you knew her once, but she cannot see you now. She is too focused on the horizon line.

You follow her gaze all the way to a woman, a stranger, Eve in her first moments of creation, your mother. She is knee-deep in the sand with her face toward the clouds, laughing. Each in and out of the tide buries her deeper, and the girl is begging the ocean to stop. She stares at the waves as if they have eyes that can see her outstretched hands and yells stop!  Her words drop onto the sand in front of her and slip away into the sea, and she seems so tired. And there’s nothing left, so you run to your mother. You pull her up by the arm and you scream too. “Stop! I am tired!” You scream like you’ve never screamed, and you begin to lose sight of your screaming self—Stop! We are tired!—until the rush of water ceases all at once, still as statue, clear as glass.  

You can see straight through to the ocean floor where your mother’s feet are freeing themselves from the sand, and the water does not ripple… There are no more voices… There is no more wind… There are no more waves crashing to shore. 

With her wrist trapped in your hands, she faces you, finally. You catch a glimmer of a sunburned forehead. 

You wake to the birds: louder now, more brazen. They sound well-rested, but you know better. Their whistles find their way into your home with the mid-morning sun, and you blink against the light to find your teacup at your feet. It is the last from your mother’s mother’s set, and it’s broken—shattered to unrecognizable ruin—but you guess that was a long while coming. And you guess that they will both forgive you. 

And you guess you should clean up the mess, 
but as you kneel to collect the pieces, you see an old friend. 

She’s reflected in the puddle of tea on the floor,
and she is smiling at you,

and you are smiling at her.