11:48 - Friday, May. 05, 2006
my hoping could not sustain them anymore
I had a beautiful night last night, and it was entirely by accident, though at one point in my drifting from wonderful dream to wonderful dream, I slowly became aware that my body also could drift, physically, that it could lift off the ground. That one point was also the point at which I was kissing someone, and my feet flowed out behind me, then over me, while all the while I was attached at the lips, soon upside down.

I walked into a dark wood house in the early morning with my two best friends beside me. The family in the house was asleep, though it wasn't TOO early, maybe 8 or 9... and we had to peer into each darkened room and each sleeping lump on the bed to see if we had found who we were looking for. We didn't, not until we got to the final room, and we had gotten the only awake person in the house to call him over the intercom. We'd woken him up, but he wasn't angry. It was snowing, but warm, and there were snow angels on his front lawn. He sat in the green glow of his computer, blue eighth notes dancing from the screen, laid me in his lap, and told me stories for hours, his face inches from mine. It makes me sad even now, in the waking world, that I can't remember his stories because they were just as comforting as closed eyes and classical music swells, or a totally silent full-body professional massage when they've forgotten to turn on the quintessential massage CD (tuneless shakuhachi), or the sun coming out across my feet when I'm asleep under a tree. When he stopped, even after hours and hours, after my friends had left, after the rest of the house had awakened, I begged him to keep talking. "Please don't stop. Please."
"Why?"
"I love it when you talk." How incomplete of me. There are so few times when you can curl into someone's body, or even into blankets, and listen and listen to listen to things that turn out beautiful and catching and revealing without feeling the pressure to think of a witty, or awkward, or resonant thing to say back. Often I think things would turn out better if I didn't have to start fumbling for responses all the time. When I do that, it never comes out how I'm feeling. It comes out witty. I don't want to be witty. I want to just have to say "I love it when you talk". And then continue to listen, and fall back into dreams and journeys.
He looked at me, then out his window, at the snow angels. When his eyes turned away, I lifted my hand and touched his face. It's funny, because when I dream about him, something is always radically different from how he is: once his hair was cut short, once he was five feet tall. This time, he was clean-shaven. My palm scraped softly against his cheek and he looked back at me. "Keep talking. Please."
"Okay," he agreed, and he did, and I fell away, and in dreams, unfortunately, sometimes, when you fall away, you literally fall away, and I did, I fell away from him and landed in a school hallway. Fuzzy at first, but focusing. Thinking it was a story, I welcomed it.

We were in rows, and dividing our time between writing sheet music and daydreaming. My daydreams were about rollercoasters and chapped lips. My music was about finished, but the instructor striding back and forth kept comparing my work to a girl on the end's and suggested we take private lessons from him, which meant: compete to see who was better in a more personal setting. We submitted our work, then ran away. We held hands in green bathing suits and ran directly into my daydream about rollercoasters, deliberately making it summer, deliberately making the sun shine and cutting the lines and making everything a heart-stopping drop, but no spinning, and making it muddy, a spray which caught us across the bellies when we hit a strong curve, that caught our smiles and made us shriek with laughter. When we stepped into the calm pools scattered here and there, spirals of mud curled from our bodies and sank, drifting, to the pool floor.
Her legs would waver and scatter under the surface, shrink and elongate with the ripples of the water. Her legs were so white, it was nearly impossible to discern their shifting shape from the directed sunbeam filtering through the branches above us. The branches, under the water, played dark squiggly squares on the white of her legs and sometimes blinded me when I tried to look closer and understand. So I looked at my own legs, and there they were, slightly tanned, long, but also entirely unaltered by the light filtering from above and the water splashing and moving below. And I thought when I looked at us next to each other, water and light wreaking havoc on her form and leaving mine stubbornly pristine, that maybe - just maybe - I could fly. If light couldn't change me, if water couldn't change me, then why should I expect that gravity would be able to change me?
I paddled my arms in the water, starting at a place where I knew I could, in a place where four year olds can give their mothers piggyback rides easily, and my feet lifted, and kept lifting, and then my chest lifted, and as I rose from the water I knew something else, something aside from gravity having no effect on me: I knew I was asleep and dreaming - and somewhere, still in his lap on a snowy day - and I took that in a thousand different ways at once. I took it to mean that I knew I was everywhere I was supposed to be, that everything I was doing was the right thing to be doing, and that everything I chose to do also would be the right thing to do, because who can be immoral or regretful or embarrassed in a dream? and so right before I floated too high, I reached down and grabbed the girl's hands so I would stay near her. My body dipped down to the point where my belly brushed the water, and my lips brushed her lips, then held.

Where are feelings in a dream? Feelings in life - in here, right now - are all in my brain, no matter their effect on me: they are all in my brain and are forced to stay there. In a dream, they occur wherever and in whatever form, and in this case, they occurred in my feet, and my feet rose to the sky like they were being pulled by one tiny green balloon. Soon I was upside down, kissing, knowing I was asleep, knowing I was being told a story, knowing I would awaken, eventually; knowing, also, that my eyes - my real eyes - wouldn't open for hours more and I was free to drift between kissing upside down and listening to and perhaps living whatever stories he chose to tell me until my hoping could not sustain them anymore.

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