Last night I dreamt the most beautiful dream. I woke up with a warm softness in my heart, sad but content.
My dreams are normally exhausting, lost luggages, lost passports, missing flights, murders, hostages, being chased, being naked in public or the least & most common, filthy dark toilets. From these dreams I wake up beaten up, my heart bruised and heavy, my brain foggy, my shoulders slumped & tired to the bones. I often think I must deserve it. It must be the consequence of a troubled soul and a guilty mind.
But last night, I was in heaven. I had travelled back in time, we were all together, my parents, my sisters, we were as young as we were back when we lived in my childhood house, the house where I was last purely childishly happy. We went from room to room, I was swallowing all the details with my eyes, thrilled beyond my heart's capacity that I was able to see & remember every room, every piece of furniture, every window and corner. The house was as big and glorious as I remembered it as a child, not the small underwhelming average sight you see when you go back as an adult. I could smell the trees in the garden, I could walk into our shared bedroom, open my study desk & touch all my school books. Everything was there, I could take it all back & I was trying to take in as many details as I could. We walked and wondered at all the corners and steps that we had forgotten over years. We all ended up in the large kitchen with the old beach tree behind the window, sat at the kitchen benches, chatting and laughing, my mum cooking in the corner and as she did we each got mouthfuls of what she was making, a simple dinner which of course tasted heavenly. I woke up, happy. I could still see the bedroom, remember the feel of my school books at my fingertips, taste mum's cooking, hear my teenage sisters laughing and being mean. My heart was still warm. In the morning I played the music I listened to 10 years ago, danced to the silly tunes and felt I had a history.
It held for about 12 hours, the warm sensation of a summer's day in my childhood when the biggest worry was getting home from a day's cycling on the street after the dark & escaping the demons in the backyard while hosing down my dusty feet and begging my sister not to leave me behind. A time when we were all together, had friends behind the garden hedges, were the top of the class, had bright futures ahead and the cities, the streets, the sky and the trees were ours.
I walk the same walk everyday here, have done for the past 51 days of lockdown whenever we could get out. I said today, even I could walk these streets with eyes closed but it still feels like their city, their streets. I told M yesterday, I feel like the simplest tasks now are a competition where I lose to the average Kiwi, I don't run as fast, haven't read as much, don't get the jokes and have a hard time understanding or giving a damn about the culture. It feels like I left all my relevance at the airport in a bag I forgot 8 years ago & arrived here all wrong & backwards.
Here, I walk the streets alone, I work alone, I laugh at jokes alone. It's a team of one or at most three. No friends to wave at behind the hedges and no family to joke with or be mean to & still eat a simple dinner with around a kitchen table that's hardly holding together for all the borers. I left them all behind, rushing to the gates, nervously checking my freedom passport pressed against my chest. Little that I knew I was leaving peace behind & dragging only nightmares with me.
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