Tell Them Anyway, And You Can Make It Up As You Go

I had the little man strapped to me, in a daze from his first encounter with food that did not come from out his mother, and babbling slightly while I prepared things for dinner. I got to thinking about my own blah blah bullshit that I had written earlier about the stronger sense of empathy and whether it was a blessing or a curse. This in turn got me to thinking about the constant duality in life. Watching your child grow, even in the small beginning increments, is also marking the moments that get you closer to your own death. There is all kinds of laughter inducing, hair on the back of your neck lifting, joy in the world, and there is certainly inconsolable grief. Highs and lows, ins and outs, strikes and gutters...

I had apparently put my thoughts down to sleep before they were ready to be done though. They followed me to bed and swam around behind my closed eyes.

In my dream, a friend and former co-worker had died. He had somehow managed to set it up so that his remains were boxed up and left in a bus station lost and found, held for pick up by someone in the claims department that I work with now.

The dream became inhabited by friends, old and new, people I had once gone to school with... The locations kept switching on me, going from a bowling alley to a picnic on a cherry grove that reminded me of something out of Kurosawa's Dreams - which actually occurred to me in the dream, which seems to make all of this so post modern I can't even stand it.

Anyway, the box of remains was given to me by the claims representative and seemed way too small to be holding onto this guy's body. It was slightly bigger than a shoe box. I didn't know how he had died exactly, and didn't want to open the box and try to figure it out, but I remember thinking that these shenanigans with having to be picked up at the bus station were just so him.

There was this feeling of deep sadness at realizing that there would never be a chance to see him again, that I had let so much time get between us. I rolled the box over in my hands and saw a line written in his handwriting:

"Life is too short. Certainly too short to let something stupid get between you and someone you love."

I had enough coherence in my dream to realize that this friend was actually standing in for another friend altogether, but not enough coherence to pull me out of the dream completely. I felt the line was written for me, that he had known the box would eventually come into my hands underneath these snowing cherry trees, and suddenly I found the love that is buried in any grief.

I didn't awake at that point, I'm assuming that the dream expertly morphed into one of me riding a giant dog through a steamship or of crossing an ocean on a parmesan rind or something, but this is all I remember. And it stuck with me hard as opposed to most dreams that seem to tatter at the seams when my eyes open.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: "Kicked It In The Sun" by Built To Spill.