Dreams; A Haunting
The dream ends thusly: things are finished, and it's time to move on. vIt's time to go somewhere that looks like a home and settle down, and we cannot do tha where we are. We get into a little box, an elevator. My love, myself, and the third person who dfacilitates this sort of thing are all there. Standing in the box, my love and I watch each other. The elevator doesn't seem to move, but somehow we are moving, and changing. I am getting older; he is getting older. Hair greys, skin roughens, we sit there and watch each other get older until I can't stand it and I bury myself in his arms. The primary emotion is a poignant sort of joy. We are going where we want to go, but we're missing out on the lives that we are each living, elsewhere. I can see stories slipping past his eyes, until at last we are where we want to be, a corridor in some distant planet.
We step out of the little box, much of our lives now behind us, but free to live the rest of them together. I see my brother then. He too has travelled this way, and he's older by far. There is a wrench of pain as I realise I've missed out on so much of his life too, and then we step into each other's arms.
That's how the dream ended. There was more, other things that led to this, a sequence in a swimming pool and all the story-things that dreams usually have, but it's the end that hit me. When I was young (oh, Kynnin) I had wanted someone to go through all my intense life experiences with so that we'd know each other, we'd see each other change, we'd always be there with each other. That passed away reasonably recently, the desire for that folding under the reality that it cannot happen. It's too late, much of my life is behind me; and besides, that sort of leaning is different than the deliberate, continued association of two people who do what they can for each other and who stand on their own feet. My family took that place for awhile, people who had been there since the beginning and who knew most things, but the closeness isn't always there; I don't lay my troubles on them, and they try not to on me. Now I am a person singular in the universe, associated with others by very strong webs indeed but alone in my own skin. I go out into the world with others sometimes, but it is side-by-side and not inside a unit with them. I go out by myself as well, and I bring back my growth and my stories to try to make sense of with those close to me.
And right now, of course, yes, Graham's grandmother has died and he's helping to plan the funeral; Juggler is working on a divorce; mom is getting buried in lawyers by my step-father. There are changes afoot locked away inside people, where I can't see them even if I stand there and look, even if I can see them getting older before my eyes I can't see the journey of their lives. I can only see that, indeed, they're different. I can only see that they come back to me with stories, and these stories perhaps mean something to them.
I know that I've changed, in that my own rock at the centre of the universe grows ever heavier, I grow ever stabler, I square my shoulders more and more when I walk out alone. It's a measure of that change that I don't feel, anymore, as if my life is passing at any speed at all. I've arrived somewhere, and now it's the scenery that changes around me.
Tht's all beside the point, though. If I could be there, in where it makes a difference, I would be. Where I can't, I will simply be here when you get back.
We step out of the little box, much of our lives now behind us, but free to live the rest of them together. I see my brother then. He too has travelled this way, and he's older by far. There is a wrench of pain as I realise I've missed out on so much of his life too, and then we step into each other's arms.
That's how the dream ended. There was more, other things that led to this, a sequence in a swimming pool and all the story-things that dreams usually have, but it's the end that hit me. When I was young (oh, Kynnin) I had wanted someone to go through all my intense life experiences with so that we'd know each other, we'd see each other change, we'd always be there with each other. That passed away reasonably recently, the desire for that folding under the reality that it cannot happen. It's too late, much of my life is behind me; and besides, that sort of leaning is different than the deliberate, continued association of two people who do what they can for each other and who stand on their own feet. My family took that place for awhile, people who had been there since the beginning and who knew most things, but the closeness isn't always there; I don't lay my troubles on them, and they try not to on me. Now I am a person singular in the universe, associated with others by very strong webs indeed but alone in my own skin. I go out into the world with others sometimes, but it is side-by-side and not inside a unit with them. I go out by myself as well, and I bring back my growth and my stories to try to make sense of with those close to me.
And right now, of course, yes, Graham's grandmother has died and he's helping to plan the funeral; Juggler is working on a divorce; mom is getting buried in lawyers by my step-father. There are changes afoot locked away inside people, where I can't see them even if I stand there and look, even if I can see them getting older before my eyes I can't see the journey of their lives. I can only see that, indeed, they're different. I can only see that they come back to me with stories, and these stories perhaps mean something to them.
I know that I've changed, in that my own rock at the centre of the universe grows ever heavier, I grow ever stabler, I square my shoulders more and more when I walk out alone. It's a measure of that change that I don't feel, anymore, as if my life is passing at any speed at all. I've arrived somewhere, and now it's the scenery that changes around me.
Tht's all beside the point, though. If I could be there, in where it makes a difference, I would be. Where I can't, I will simply be here when you get back.