A Dream before the Thunder
Mar. 29th, 2011 01:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonThunder barked me out of my sleep and so the dream remains fresh, vivid on the lips of memory who throughout the day whispered to me fragments of its brief narrative.
My father and I were passengers onboard a trolley car wide as a cargo plane’s hull. There was no one else there, not even a driver, though I vaguely remember another presence, neo lurking silently just beyond the periphery of my recall. Outside the floor to wall windows of the trolley, the city at night after the rain. Black shadow streets empty and drenched in puddles glowing silver with the reflection of an invisible skyline. The whole trip we were arguing. Or at least I was. I was a teenager. I don’t know how I knew that, some intuitive filling of a role demanded by the dream’s logic perhaps or did I catch my reflection in the pane and simply recognize an earlier incarnation of myself?
It doesn’t matter. I was a teenager and I was raging at him, not shouting or screaming, just releasing this tirade of angry words scissor snapped one after the other. He had to listen to me. He had to hear my warning before it was too late. He couldn’t let me grow up to be the person I was going to be. I shook him by his shoulders, something in real life I would never do. But he just stood there with his eyes closed. I realized suddenly he was the age he is now. I stepped back. He shook his head slightly, as if to say it was too late, that the chance was gone and he had done all he could do.
Then it occurred to me he wasn’t shaking his head. The trolley was merely shaking us as it picked up momentum and I knew then what it was that I had forgotten. I was supposed to warn him about the tumor. I was supposed to say something before it was too late but I didn’t and now neither were going to be able to get off the trolley.
I left my father standing there, suspended upright dangling asleep from the looped hooks that hung from the ceiling off a rail – the very image of the weary commuter on a F-Train commute between long days. I walked over to the window and like I did when I was a child, I pressed my forehead against the pane and watched the lights of city blur by me.
It was then my father laid his hand on my shoulder and I saw his reflection in the window and realized that his eyes were still closed.
And when the storm plucked me out of this vision and plunged me back onto the shores of a momentarily unfamiliar dark, I gasped. I laid there a moment until the shadows of the room sculpted themselves into the familiar outline of my parent’s den.
In snatches the last few days rolled between the room shaking growl of the thunder. My father’s tears, the tears of a little boy scared looking into the eyes of his son for the strength he planted there long ago. My mother’s courage, a fierce sadness tamed by wine and an indomitable will, keeping it, and by extension us, together. A dead pigeon left for me by the cats in the hallway at the house sitting gig, the two dons watching me side-by-side waiting patiently for my gratitude for their gift – around me the condo blanketed in gray feathers. Sunday morning coffee and a bowl with my oldest friend who, with his all-American smile, his mid-western lackadaisical charm and his affable Zen confidence warmed the numbness that had consumed my spirits. Standing on the balcony listening to a owl hooting wildly unseen and knowing that it was sent to deliver an omen that arrived a week too late. Then I remembered a much needed birthday kiss, a slight touch of her thighs against mine, her hand upon me briefly and the gravity of my sorrows lifted by her smile.
Then and only then did I drift back to sleep, even if only for an hour or so before waking again to get ready to go down to the hospital with the folks. There the dream of my sleeping father and our ride through the empty city flared between zombie eyed glances at a waiting room television or at the steel walls of the elevator ride or while standing in the rain trying to jump start my brain with a cigarette just outside the hospital.
Or between sips of wine before manning an empty bed to drift off to a sleep I need but desperately do not want. So I’ll leave the dream here on these pages, where it will dwindle into simple distraction and chained by these words will haunt me no longer.
My father and I were passengers onboard a trolley car wide as a cargo plane’s hull. There was no one else there, not even a driver, though I vaguely remember another presence, neo lurking silently just beyond the periphery of my recall. Outside the floor to wall windows of the trolley, the city at night after the rain. Black shadow streets empty and drenched in puddles glowing silver with the reflection of an invisible skyline. The whole trip we were arguing. Or at least I was. I was a teenager. I don’t know how I knew that, some intuitive filling of a role demanded by the dream’s logic perhaps or did I catch my reflection in the pane and simply recognize an earlier incarnation of myself?
It doesn’t matter. I was a teenager and I was raging at him, not shouting or screaming, just releasing this tirade of angry words scissor snapped one after the other. He had to listen to me. He had to hear my warning before it was too late. He couldn’t let me grow up to be the person I was going to be. I shook him by his shoulders, something in real life I would never do. But he just stood there with his eyes closed. I realized suddenly he was the age he is now. I stepped back. He shook his head slightly, as if to say it was too late, that the chance was gone and he had done all he could do.
Then it occurred to me he wasn’t shaking his head. The trolley was merely shaking us as it picked up momentum and I knew then what it was that I had forgotten. I was supposed to warn him about the tumor. I was supposed to say something before it was too late but I didn’t and now neither were going to be able to get off the trolley.
I left my father standing there, suspended upright dangling asleep from the looped hooks that hung from the ceiling off a rail – the very image of the weary commuter on a F-Train commute between long days. I walked over to the window and like I did when I was a child, I pressed my forehead against the pane and watched the lights of city blur by me.
It was then my father laid his hand on my shoulder and I saw his reflection in the window and realized that his eyes were still closed.
And when the storm plucked me out of this vision and plunged me back onto the shores of a momentarily unfamiliar dark, I gasped. I laid there a moment until the shadows of the room sculpted themselves into the familiar outline of my parent’s den.
In snatches the last few days rolled between the room shaking growl of the thunder. My father’s tears, the tears of a little boy scared looking into the eyes of his son for the strength he planted there long ago. My mother’s courage, a fierce sadness tamed by wine and an indomitable will, keeping it, and by extension us, together. A dead pigeon left for me by the cats in the hallway at the house sitting gig, the two dons watching me side-by-side waiting patiently for my gratitude for their gift – around me the condo blanketed in gray feathers. Sunday morning coffee and a bowl with my oldest friend who, with his all-American smile, his mid-western lackadaisical charm and his affable Zen confidence warmed the numbness that had consumed my spirits. Standing on the balcony listening to a owl hooting wildly unseen and knowing that it was sent to deliver an omen that arrived a week too late. Then I remembered a much needed birthday kiss, a slight touch of her thighs against mine, her hand upon me briefly and the gravity of my sorrows lifted by her smile.
Then and only then did I drift back to sleep, even if only for an hour or so before waking again to get ready to go down to the hospital with the folks. There the dream of my sleeping father and our ride through the empty city flared between zombie eyed glances at a waiting room television or at the steel walls of the elevator ride or while standing in the rain trying to jump start my brain with a cigarette just outside the hospital.
Or between sips of wine before manning an empty bed to drift off to a sleep I need but desperately do not want. So I’ll leave the dream here on these pages, where it will dwindle into simple distraction and chained by these words will haunt me no longer.