november 5, 2010

+ something zoe said this morning that i never want to forget. we were discussing dreams, i was reminding her of the one i had last winter when she was so very sick and i slept on the couch to listen for her fever calls. she was incredibly weak, first being downed with the flu and then even further struck down by bronchitis. she refused to eat anything, even cherry jello. then she refused water, crying with no tears, dehydrated, eyes raccooned with purple. her fevers laid in wait for liquid tylenol to run its course before they came back sneering, a hot monster whose occupation is eternally listed as "stealing your children at night". it was the most frightened i've ever been in my entire life.

my dream while i was lightly sleeping was this: i pulled up a video on the internet to show the kids. it had children in it, but not the kind of children someone could have intentionally made a video of. this boy and girl were victims of some victorian disease, all black and white like an old photograph, watching us from the other side of the screen. the boy's solemn little face got closer and closer. "oh," i said in surprise. his eyes were ghost eyes, milky and almost opalescent. he stared at us and we stared back. the kids began to protest with no words, too scared to think of anything to say, so it came out a whine. "i'm so sorry," i said to my daughters. "i didn't mean for you to see this." "this is not what i was trying to show you." i wanted to protect them from that face, the face of plagues and decades of premature child deaths, lives robbed because back then there was no medicine that could keep them here, beat the monsters away. i had the feeling so many mothers have surely felt, that primal instinct to protect children from sickness and death. "this isn't what i meant to show you at all."

the dream changed then, and i was travelling through an empty city, regular in all ways except the queer silence and lack of people on the street. nothing, nothing, and then flowers would fall from the sky, or rather, fake flowers, but only one single flower at a time, drifting frail and quiet and ominous. at first i thought the flowers were real, but upon inspection they were artificial, a mockery. this meant one of the fakes was coming. the people who, though dead, could pass for the living. a warning. sometimes i could fight my way through them, but when more than one flower would fall i would hide and wait for them to walk draggingly by in their crowd. when i struck one of them their facade would crack, branch like lightning and there was only rot beneath.

on a side note, at this time i was (as well as dealing with sickness) dealing with my own fakes. shells of people masquerading as people with depth. mannequins. plastic people. disappointments. all of them girls, who were sickeningly sweet to your face but full of nastiness and jealousy inside.

also, flowers for me will always be equated with death after i chose star lilies for my grandmother's funeral bouquet. that cloying smell mixed with the smell of rapid and dark bodily decay in a country funeral home with an abundance of (forced sympathy, plastic wood casket, artificial light, regurgitated gospel) fabrications. the scent of flowers became fake itself, a cover-up for ancient organisms to do their secret work under.

back to this morning, i reminded zoe of that dream and she instantly remembered what i was talking about. "your dreams are so cleverly constructed," she said. what a way with words, has she.