Dreamality

He notices that she has a unique and delicate curve in her cheek, which makes him feel a certain sense of comfort. It is as though he is reminded of something embedded in his childhood which he can’t quite recall and might never be able to. Maybe, he thinks, he dreams of it sometimes – but not that he’d ever know. The tiny hairs on her skin are catching the light and shimmering. He thinks of his great-grandmother’s bedroom, and can see sparkling dust hover in the calm of an early sunbeam. He is watching the dust, sometimes trying to touch it. The sun makes the smooth wooden floor look shiny and feel warm, so he sits on it. Her slippers are beside him, the ones she usually wears when she’s sitting in an armchair watching him play. She taps her feet lightly, gently on the carpet, and laughs carefully, always with a mug balanced upon her lap. She did the dishes again tonight, despite mother’s insistence – she says that she enjoys it. He watches her from the floor, a creamy carpeted family room. He is building blocks with his father and his sister, and she is watching him, and smiling, always smiling.

Another day, it’s a girl with a braid. Her hair is pale, so blonde it is almost white. A braid is cresting her forehead, with baby hairs breaking free here and there, twisting softly down around her face. Her skin is pale too, and unblemished. The face is plain, but delicate, with a nose so small that it seems almost incidental. Staring at the braid, he thinks of snow. He remembers a time, which he isn’t sure has come into existence yet, when he lived up north. Up north it was always about cold and mountains and trees burdened by icing snow, standing undisturbed for months and months. The route to town took twenty minutes, travelling down a twisted dirt (but perpetually snowed-over) road. There were trees always, and sometimes fields. The bridge was his favourite part, crossing a half-frozen river that was ever racing and tripping over itself, just peeking up between small cliffs of snow. The forest emanated mystery, pristine stillness and secret. Maybe it went on forever. What is hidden beneath all that snow anyway? And where do all the rabbit prints lead? He liked to think that his own little house was a part of the mystery, half-hidden, half-wood and half-brick, he always felt it was as much a part of the forest as the tree-roots and the ice.

Sometimes he can’t even be sure that it is her hair or face that causes it – once it was a sweater. The sweater was red, a red that he knew well and seemed like a home colour to him. Maybe his favourite blanket had been red, or perhaps it was the colour of the tablecloth his mother had put on the kitchen table every October. The pattern on it seems like home as well, criss-crossing white and black, creating snowflake-like patterns across the shoulders. She wears it with long loose hair, light brown and baby-fine, and with jeans. The red is Halloween. It’s his street, “golden lane” his father liked to call it, on the way home from school. Half of the trees’ leaves are on the ground, and he is scoping out the houses with the best decorations. There is one in particular which always has a string of electric pumpkins upon its railing, and hanging ghosts on its porch that howl and screech, more exciting than frightening. This house is high above all the others, there are at least twenty-eight steps leading up to it, he had counted them. One time when he rang the bell, a boy his own age who he didn’t know had answered. The boy was crying, and dressed like Mickey Mouse. He stops to pick up a perfect maple leaf from the ground, to add to his collection, and continues towards home.

When he comes to again, he never knows what exactly they were. They aren’t something he can control, and certainly cannot force. Occasionally he wonders if other people experience them as well – these momentary instances in which he becomes so paralyzed by a life he isn’t even leading that he loses all sense of his own, and might gladly never return to it. He also ponders their nature – are they reflections of imaginary lives that his subconscious has created, and tucked away in remote corners of his mind? Are they fleeting and fractured glimpses into the folds of somebody else’s life? Perhaps they are just memories, mutated and heightened by the cacophony of experience that is his life. They are like dreams, always, and they feel familiar. The most frustrating thing about them though is that afterwards, he can never be sure that they even happened. They are gone almost before they begin, leaving behind nothing but a nagging sense of something had and lost, and a vague discomfort associated with the loss of a place that felt fleetingly like home.

written by Richard Meconi