This dream-city was divided up into districts. Some were nice, some were so-so, some were slums, and some were just death zones. I needed to get into the death zone for some reason, and I had met this girl, this really cute, young wisp of a girl, and we were trying to figure out how to get into the death zone district. We made our way over to it, and I opened the gate. From inside we could hear guns and shouts and all kinds of violent noise. I had heard that the life expectancy of anyone just walking straight into this district was less than a minute. The girl and I looked at each other, and she said that we could either go right in and most likely get killed immediately, or she could go in the back way through this drainage pipe that she knew of and come get me once she'd cleared a path. That way made more sense, so before she left, I embraced her very closely and we just held each other like that for a long time, wondering if we'd see each other again. I was thinking to myself, "Do I really care for this girl in this way, or am I just being selfish by trying to, and making myself feel this way?" Then we separated and she was gone.
Then I was wandering the streets with this piece of poster board, and attached to it in rows were these little bags of screws and nails. I was trying to get back to my own district to do something important with all of it, and on the way I dropped it as I was crossing a street and the wind blew it several feet away from me. I ran back for it, and I passed somebody who remarked that I looked like I was in a real hurry, and not to be so hurried that I make some kind of mistake, and he referred to this news item from several years ago, in which these archeologists ruined this expensive dig by trying to speed through it. He asked me if I remembered which dig he was talking about. I thought about it, and was about to say King Tut, but then I remembered that it wasn't a ruined dig, it was a curse or something. Then I remembered, it was this dig in Iraq back in 2003, and they were trying to bring this broken piece of a statue back to the surface, this statue leg, and in their haste had destroyed it. I called to the guy, who was walking away, and said, "It was this statue leg, right? Some kind of leg they were digging up in Iraq?" He stopped and looked back at me. "You got it!" he said, surprised and smiling, and he walked away.
I turned my attention back to the poster board and screws, and began picking up the little baggies, which had become detached. They were all dirty, and the poster board had folded over and dirt had gotten into the crease. I spent a fair amount of time gathering it all up and cussing and just being irritated, and a car pulled up and stopped on the other side of the street. I didn't look up, but then I noticed somebody standing over me, very close to me. I stopped what I was doing and looked up, and it was Leah. She was smiling down at me. I just continued to look up at her, stunned and immobile. She knelt down and gave me a kiss and said, "I couldn't stay away. I tried, for a long time I tried. I tried, and I couldn't. I just couldn't." And then she embraced me. I couldn't believe it. Here she was, and I couldn't believe it. A surge of happiness washed through me, and then the dream began to fade, and as it did, I thought about the other girl I'd just met, and I hoped she wouldn't be hurt, that she hadn't begun to develop feelings for me.
And then when the dream re-formed, Leah and I and my sister Cheyenne and my brother Matt were all at Leah's apartment. I was sitting at her table, and she was milling around, picking up dishes and whatnot, just straightening up some. She was explaining to me how she had finally come to the decision that she couldn't stay away anymore, and that she didn't care about all of the problems and reasons for why she left in the first place, and that she was tired of Nick's shenanigans, and that she realized that she loved me, that it was like a thunderbolt when the truth of it hit, that she'd loved me all along and that everything had been a distraction to keep that knowledge from her. She came around and sat across the table from me and pulled my hands onto the table and held them there, with our arms lying on the table, sitting across from each other. She looked directly into my eyes and said, "We need to talk to Fr. Justin about this. About where we left off." I looked at my sister, and then at my brother, and they were both smiling, and I thought, I can't believe this. I can't believe it, I just can't believe it, and I began to smile, and my heart began to soar, and I got up and Leah got up, and we held each other and I kissed her, and then held her close, and I began crying into her hair, getting her hair wet with my tears. She started crying too, and she said, "Why is it that we cry when we're so happy?" I thought about it and realized that joy and pain came from the same place, deep in your heart, and I looked into my heart right then, as I was holding Leah and crying tears of joy, and saw how similar the two feelings were. How the joy in my heart I was feeling right then actually hurt a little. How it was rubbing up against all kinds of damage and scarring and wounded places in my heart, like when you irritated a wound before it's fully healed by bumping it against something, but that it felt good instead of bad... but it still hurt. I tried to express this to Leah as I held her, but my voice cracked and I was choked up, and I couldn't get any coherent words out right then because my nose was stopped up from crying and I had swallowed a bunch of tears and I had to clear my throat first, but then I didn't care about saying anything anymore. So I just remained like I was instead, holding her close, feeling her arms around me and her chin on my shoulder and our heads touching and our hair mingling, holding her so close that I could touch my elbows, and thinking that it was the happiest moment of my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment