dreams

There is a sort of dream that you look forward to, that rears its head from time to time when things seem to be at their most dire. Most dreams are just fragments anyway, scattered pieces of the good times and the bad times, of people long gone and people still here. A few laughs in a humid, scrubby Florida backyard, fueled by tequila and the fuzzy glow of christmas lights. Happiness seems to flow by like a fat muddy river on a lazy saturday. Sometimes it is the fear that stalks you, and you wake on the floor of your attic room uneasy, grabbing for the switch on the lamp beside you, your heart pounding. Sometimes dreams leave you floating through the day scratching your head over an existential paradox, the underpinnings of which you can't seem to recollect. Once in a dream you perished in an airplane crash, and thoughts of your own morality followed you for months.

But there is this one dream, and sometimes you feel as though you only have it when half awake, when you are really by all accounts the maker of your own destiny- but it still feels like a dream. You are walking down the seawall in Pensacola Bay, the sky is dark blue fading into a sort of violet haze, and you come to the end. The water is choppy, slapping both sides of the narrow wall, shaking you. You look toward the sea, and you see the monster rising, moving slow and powerful above the rest of the waves, swallowing them in its wake. It moves over the causeway like a stormcloud, and faces you down like the sort of giant you heard about only in the worst bedtime stories. As it hits you, breaking your body, you lose yourself in the moment, you know that this is what you most need, that your spirit or soul or whatever else is left after your body is gone is finally going home, home to that place between the waves, that place the Chilean poet spoke of, the one place you will feel free.