dream ignored

“I don’t know where I found this dream, I mean when and where it was born in me, but I see the face of a beautiful girl, dark hair, very soft skin, but kind of a hard look, or a look of dissatisfaction long sustained, a sentiment that arrived long ago and never left, one that used to be instrumental and advantageous, that must have seemed fashionable at first, then uniquely expressive of how she genuinely felt, and finally involuntary, something only others see. Because a look is just that, it doesn’t come with any solutions. But it attracts. It attracts me. This is no doubt an adolescent fantasy, but I still have it, as time goes on it becomes more and more real, more heartbreaking, because I know I will never find it, and, even worse, I believe that I have found it before, maybe several times, but I could never forgive them their reality, as if I myself were anything else…! Yes, it’s all so adolescent. This girl, I find her in a small town, or a less developed, more brutal and desperate city, while I’m traveling alone, me and a car and a little money, while traveling I don’t speak to anybody for days, so I walk around with hot coffee in cold hands, stand in front of gas stations or in supermarket parking lots, and all of a sudden there’s this girl, bundled up a little haphazardly, she’s looking at me with big eyes, but surreptitiously, mistrustful, as I look at myself, inwardly. You can’t imagine how many different scenarios I’ve come up with in which I collide with this girl, for the slow or sudden intertwining of our lives. I think everything I’ve written has been an elaboration on this fantasy. It’s what keeps me moving forward in time. Like a carrot dangled… it may be, it probably is a phantom carrot, or just a mirage - that’s a better metaphor - a hallucination born of thirst… but at times it seems so real to me, certainly more real than any… these scenarios, let me give you an example. I pull into a strange town at dawn, gliding in on an empty tank of gas. I find a gas station just as the engine starts to fail. I pull up next to a pump, but the station’s not open yet. I get out of the car and gaze across the road at a thick, impenetrable bank of trees, the forest that’s been rushing by all night. It’s frigid in the dawn air, my breath comes out in blooms of frost, I rub my hands together, my heart is enormous and empty, but with a tiny spark of promise, like the sky and its distant suggestion of day, struggling like it has to invent the first day, and it’s been working all night in secret trying to get it right… my heart, so many times wrestled to the ground and broken, yet has to invent the first love, having worked so often in secret to get it right. Everything up until now has been rehearsal… life is a perpetual rehearsal for the next moment. This is the curtain finally rising… and, having nailed life a thousand times in my dreams, out on reality’s stage, I hear the board creak under my foot, the world performs a sickening pivot, and I forget all my lines… In front of the station’s locked and shuttered door I find a bundle of the day’s newspapers, but my hands are so cold and chapped, I’ve barely begun trying to work one free from the plastic tie when I give up… this is some intimation of Truth, of The Way Things Are, and the Story of My Life… that kind of thing… but the air, the temperature, everything is too immediate and demanding of presence… quiet, open, receptive presence, full attention, that I don’t follow any thought too far away from myself where I stand steeped in this elegant dawn… being unfamiliar with yourself in an unfamiliar environment is like being locked in a room with somebody who for years you’ve only glimpsed from afar. I feel bare before myself, and look on at me looking on at the dawn, at my car, at the road that is so awkward in its stationary aspect, after driving all night, the way you see crows sort of hopping on the grass. I get back in my car and feel enormously, infinitely tired, I think of the strain we put, in our lifetimes, on this - alas! - temporarily self-renewing structure, which after all is far less sturdy than we think, which is why we build our fortresses of… I fall asleep. And what wakes me up is a soft tapping of knuckles on glass. The window has steamed over. I can’t roll it down without turning on the car, so instead I open the door. She steps away, giving me room. She has dark hair, very soft skin, but kind of a hard look… she’s looking at me with big eyes, but surreptitiously…”