Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Four Days

My father told me not to stick my fingers through my dreamcatcher.
"Why?"
"Your bad dreams will escape and haunt you."
"What about the good dreams?"

My father stared at the parking lot outside my window as if a great drama was unfolding, a Greek play like the ones he taught to college Freshman at Rutgers University. Enter, Stage Left, Sisiphus with fire from the Gods, his great gift to humans: The Knowledge to blow ourselves up.

Sun fell on the windshields of cars, the freshly painted lines between parking spaces, and--I know because my father saw them too-- the trees that used to be there, the magnolia petals clogging the stream between our house and the town.

"Dad, what about the good dreams?"

*



If we don't poke our good dreams from the dreamcatcher, they will rot between the strings. They will droop like the skin under our eyes. They will grow old.

When I was young, I looked for adventure in books, or in the clothes in my attic, dresses and mink coats like in the movies my mom watched when she was blue. I ambled in the woods looking for talking lions, Jimmy Stewart, a glimmer in the stream.

Just looking.

I watched many good dreams rot before I realized that adventure is not something you look for. Not outside, anyway. It's something you find under the ribby ruins of that shrine you built to your past. All those bad dreams you let haunt you.

This is what happened to Sisiphus: After giving us the power to blow ourselves up, he was punished by the Gods. He was forced to push a very-damn-infinitely heavy boulder up a very-damn-infinitely high mountain. Forever.

When you're haunted, the bad dreams roll over each other until you're pushing a putty glob of bones, your personal snowball from Hell. Adventure is letting it go. You jump from the mountain into an unfamiliar lake.

Adventure isn't the slimy boulder you're used to. It's thin air and the water like a wall of bricks, your breath knocked from your lungs.

Then you shudder. Then you breathe.

*



Four days until my adventure begins.
*

1 comment:

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