When grieving Bay Mitchell wakes up, disoriented, in a parking lot at one a.m., he has no recollection of how he got there. His bones ache, his car is smoking, and his windshield is cracked. But it's familiar. So he convinces himself he's intoxicate...
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DREAMS ARE SIPHONS for our subconscious. A playground for repressed thoughts and emotions. A room full of inebriated people. No order, no sense, just instinct.
Ever since my mom died, a few days after my high school graduation and a day before her fiftieth birthday, no less, I'd been terrified while I slept. It was always a deviation of the same thing. I'd dream of a seemingly normal moment in time. I'd be relieved. The dream was reality and reality was a dream. My mom wasn't dead, couldn't be dead. It was just the manifestation of a fear I hadn't been handling well.
Mom would be at the stove, preparing one of her many savory meals, hips swaying to music I couldn't hear but could feel in my fingertips, humming along to the tune of a song that didn't exist. Bryant would be at the kitchen table, leaned over his laptop. Sunlight would filter in through the curtains, dust motes jollying at its presence. My phone screen would be lit up with an open text thread, three bubbles dancing on Mia's side as I waited for a response to a question that was, in reality, very unserious.
Then I'd start to speak, recounting something funny or something random. I'd talk for a long time, but she'd remain at the stove, Bryant at his laptop, the bubbles still dancing as Mia continued to type. Then I'd ask if she could hear me, but there'd be no response. Then I'd feel a profound sadness that was out of place in the context of that reality. Why was I so sad? Maybe she just didn't hear me. It would then stay that way until I was roused from sleep, my reality pierced through.
Another day, she'd be on the couch, her favorite scarf wrapped around her shoulders as she watched a game show on our boxy Sanyo TV. We hadn't used that since 2006, so I'd assume I was younger, and the house would immediately step back in time, too. Older, brighter furniture, most of them spilled over from the 90s, a stack of CDs and DVDs displayed on the spiral rack next to the TV stand, the screams of children in the distance wafting in, the thump of music from the neighbor's stereo.
I'd curl into her side, and she'd silently put an arm around me. Then I'd realize it wasn't a game show on TV but a rerun of Courage the Cowardly Dog. I'd make to look at her face, but something would distract me. It was either that, or I couldn't see past her neck, like those cartoons with the faceless parents I frequently watched. Other days, she'd look at me, and I wouldn't recognize her. She'd be carrying the face of an aunt or my elementary school teacher.
Other days, her face would be blurred out, like a watercolor painting that had been tampered with.
I'd wake up in a sweat, hand over my chest, heart thrashing behind my ribs, and I'd be hit with the sudden realization that I couldn't remember what my mom looked like. I couldn't remember what she sounded like. Countless times, I'd hyperventilated on my dorm room floor, conscious that there was nothing to go home to, that I didn't even have a home anymore. The house was still holding its breath. Regardless of all the upgrades it'd seen over the years, all the furniture it'd lost, its bones were still the same. The house remembered what even I couldn't. Waiting for someone to open the front door, waiting for someone to tend to it once more, waiting to exhale.
