The Dream and the Cunning Fennec Fox

25 September 2013

0058 hrs

     Funny how life sours us on the things we used to adore.  The things and the people, both.  The Weakness In Me, all right.

      Play me a song, Cunning Fennec Fox...

      And the cold surface of the colder creek sparkled like diamonds from the glinting summer morning sun.  I sat atop my Rock, the rock that only I sat upon, plucking at the strings of Cecelia's welcoming form.  I even remember her smell, odd for a dream, I suppose, an olfactory element either rare or unheard of in our slumber-movies.

      She smelled of warm wood, new as a sapling, old as a bristle-cone pine, the coppery scent of the bronze alloy strings warming in that soon-to-be-hotter morning.

      Play me a song, she said, and I did, as you know.  Played for the both of us the Joan Armatrading gem that I have grown to dislike, now.   Perhaps it is The Weakness In Me that has caused this fundamental shift inside my soul. 

A year ago even, I played the guitar for at least an hour a day.  Candy is her name.  But here, in the quiet solitude of my new home, Candy gathers dust in the corners.  I had written a song for Kristen, for the saker, and now it seems that in the quietest moments of my day, I can only be glad there is naught in contribution from me save for more silence.

      But I had a lot of noise to make at thirteen, didn't I? Had a lot to say, and the callouses on my fingertips were tough and grainy like the knots in an old-growth oak.

      There we were, she and I, the mysterious girl with the Hair of Gold.  God the cliche's are sickening are they not, Patient Reader?   We two and our promises of love, and our promises to find one another, and the terrible awakening.              

      The forceful extraction from that sweet slumber into the cruel birth of reality.  Extricated from that fair dream like a crash survivor is pulled from his wreckage, the first-responder knowing nothing about the white light toward which the survivor propelled himself... the welcoming white, the beckoning brethren waving you in as you swim in the warm illumination toward your heaven, that first-responder knowing only his job.  That you will not die on his watch.

      With great reluctance on my part, and a fairly heavy-handed insistence on hers, my mother wrenched from me the story of the dream.

     -What's wrong, my son?
     -Nuthin'

      -Come on... something...

      Then I spilled it. Out it came like a torrent. The dream, the goddamn dream that was to haunt me for the rest of my life, my life so far... 13 years old, first time I had it.  30 years later, still dreaming the same old dream.  More like a nightmare, the way I fear it, now.  I used to love it in its melancholia. I used to embrace it the way we all embrace sad songs when we are down, the way we hold it to us like a rainy day when we are already lost in the gloom... in the fog of life. Funny how life sours us...
     I was already on the verge of blubbering like a little kid, but I was a 13 year-old man-boy...  Right?  How could I possibly break down, in front of my mother no less- not just any woman- and still manage to save face?  No way...  Never happen.         So I swallowed down all of my emotions, a valuable skill I learned early and honed to a razor's edge to wield as a tool or a weapon.  I am truly an expert.  And then I told my mom about the dream.  I told her about the creek, and my rock, and Cecelia the guitar; I told her of The Weakness In Me, and the sadness of its sorrow; I told her about the beautiful Woman-Girl that sat beside me, rapt with wonder, watching my hands then my face, her expression alternating between love and loving more as she listened to my art.
       I spoke from my heart of her beauty...        Beauty?  she asked me...  you remember what she looked like?
       And this she asked with a note of surprise, still trying to play it cool, my mother the cucumber.  I came to find out much later that remembering Cottonwood Creek Girl's features would have been quite extraordinary.  To my mother, something just wasn't... right...
     And so I gave it some thought, was lost in it, actually...
Her hair was spun gold, but a touch tarnished, paradoxically.  Her eyes periwinkle or cornflower or one of those soft blues you get in a box of Crayons...  Not one of those little ones...  I am talking about the BIG ones that we could never afford when I was a kid.
       She was small, delicate, but I could sense a strength more powerful than she let on, quite counter-intuitive to her size.   But this much was true:  no matter how hard I tried, I could not form these remembered features into a face...
       This was every bit as bad as waking up without her.  How could I not remember what my girl looked like?  How would I find her as promised, as I promised her I would?  How the hell was I supposed to know who she was?  I could have met her the next day and I would never know.  Oh the torture...
      I saw my mother smiling knowingly, as if she read my mind like she always told us kids she could. 
       I wanted HER to be Amy C. from Mrs. Johnson's 9th grade English class...  Amy and her hard body, ass poured into her Calvin Kleins... but it wasn't Amy.  The hair was wrong, the smile different.  She didn't have that straight-toothed crooked grin SHE had...  Nope, wasn't Amy.
     Then I wanted her to be Brenda, then LuAnn, then Tricia and Renee and Michelle and Andrea and Tina and Lisa... but there was always something wrong.  Always something missing or a feature, beautiful in its own way, but still wrong.  Hair the wrong color, or she was too tall...  God, talk about picky.
      Mom saw the confusion and pain on my face.
       -you're not going to remember her face until you meet her in real life, and she'll be older, just like you will be, each time you dream The Dream...  she said to her second son.

       Each time?  Each fucking time?  I was going to have this nightmare over and over?  Jesus Harold Christ on a Fucking Rubber Crutch! is what I was thinking...

       Watch your mouth, and that's right.  Maybe the last time will be the one after you finally meet her in real life.  Then you will see her face and remember it.

       Something about the IS and how, in ITS infinite wisdom, knowing what she looked like now would be sort of...  cheating.    
       Now what, Patient Reader, you maybe asking, is so bad about a dream of your one true love?        Well, I begin in answer, it is one of those dreams from which you never want to wake; it's the way you want to die, except you awaken and find you are still alive.  Alive and alone, wanting, wishing, and praying for more slumber so that you could be there again.  Morpheus is your new god, and you are willing to sacrifice your soul, an unwitting lamb you willingly lash to the rock, raising your obsidian blade skyward above it. 
       You wake from it and you are wrecked and you feel wrecked for days or weeks after, and if you are undiagnosed bipolar you want to eat a gun.  That's what's so bad, and that's pretty bad.  And you all know what I mean- you've all had your very own Cottonwood Creek Girl Dream, so relate to it and let's move on.  Shall we?  
     
       Splendid!

       Jesus, I thought there in the dining room of my parent's home, 13 years old, and my life is already over.  I was a pretty melodramatic kid.        For the rest of my life or the long, untold years ahead of me anyway (for would I meet her the next day or on my 80th birthday?  It's not like Mom's Shinto-Buddhist superstitions were a Farmer's Almanac), I was to suffer periodic bouts of severe depression, and when the medication (booze, LSD, shrooms, weed, etc.) stopped working, well, lets just say I have a psych file from my late teens and early adulthood that have SUICIDE WATCH in big red letters within them.  These "voluntary" committals were only in the close proximity of occurrences of The Dream. Nightmare. 
       Vanessa and Vicki and Caren and all the others that were there to pass the time while I waited for a woman I knew was never coming.  Why was I cursed with the knowledge of a woman out there, somewhere, waiting for me, and I, idly biding my own life away, waiting to live?
       But fret not, Patient Reader; all these women knew they were not her.  They were passing their time, too.  Maybe they didn't know about the dream, because that was the secret between my heart and me, but they knew I was waiting for someone...else.  
       Even K, wife #2, knew we were not forever, and we were in love.  Obviously, K does not know what forever means...  she's not here, anyway.  Through thick and thin, my rebel ass.
       So then and there, somewhere in my mid-twenties, I dismissed my mother's admonitions as superstitious nonsense from a religion considerably older than written language and gave up on The Dream, and the  Little Cottonwood Creek Girl...

     Then to my surprise Patient Reader, there was February 2012...

...to be continued...