The Doors Of Sleep

If I could run backwards through time I would grab hold of that moment with you and say something unspoken.

It was in January that the key came into my possession, though we had been living in the house since November. In all the winter hustle, with little time to unpack and settle in, it went unnoticed in the drawer of the upstairs bathroom. I recognized immediately that there was something unique in its antique design.

“I loved you from the moment I first saw you.” you said.
If I could catch it like a white rabbit running I would say,
“I love you right now forever.”

The key was as silver as the liquid light of all the stars poured into one peculiar shape. That particular form was linked with that of a lock which by then was gone from the world I inhabited. Keys outlast the doors they open, the locks whose inner workings they alone understand. As the ages pass and their own purpose has waned they must long for the caress of the lock they once knew, that perfect fit.

If the words were spoken the moment would become a moon, full of soft white illumination filling a darkness that has been recorded as uninterrupted through the duration of some teleological history in the Yerba Buena museum.

“I loved you from the moment I first saw you.” you said.
If I could catch it like a white rabbit running I would say,
“I love you right now forever.”

There was no lock in the whole of the house in which it fit. I thought of the door it had once opened. When the door ceased to exist in this material realm was that the end of access to the domain it protected? Or could the key invoke the lock and door once again, opening the way to a world that has passed into dream and myth?

All occurrences affect all occurrences in the past, present, and future.

We did have that pearly eternal moment in which I watched the mechanical shutters covering the all powerful mystic centers of our fun ride machines open. Then we felt the flow of life electric, but it meant one thing to me and another to you. I saw how remarkable were the possibilities, and how unremarkable was a kiss, a lifetime of hand holding, marital bliss, love at fist sight, old age in rose gardens and book signings. To be a lock that accesses the remarkable was my deeper wish.
Destiny opens and closes the doors of sleep.

“I loved you from the moment I first saw you.” you said.
If I could catch it like a white rabbit running I would say,
“I love you right now forever.”
And still I would release it again, a white butterfly drifting into darkness.

Memory

Memory is selective, often used to justify our current stance. If I am angry with you, then for this moment, all that I remember is the innumerable times you’ve let me down, hurt my feelings, ignored my needs.
I remember the times you have abandoned me, screamed at me, kicked things off the table, smashed my fingers in car doors, elevator doors, and under prefab houses. I remember how you criticized my drawings, my singing, my way of talking, my way of walking, I remember that you threatened to have me institutionalized, that you shouted at me and demanded the sums of mathematical equations until I was in tears.
I’ll remember that you were gone for years, that you sent me to a Christian school even though you told me it was nonsense, that you told me that the children that I played with were not my friends, that I could trust no one, that I would be alone in life, that I could not play with my first schoolyard playmate because she was black. That you forced me to listen to cassettes touted as subliminal therapy meant to enhance powers of positive thinking and creativity. That you made me fill out lottery tickets for you insisting that I use my psychic ability to select the right numbers. That you asked me for my opinion and ignored it. That you lost our home and couldn’t support us.

This is what I will recollect when it suits a particular mood.

There are other moods for other moments. Then I remember you differently. I remember that you painted murals on the walls, that you took me to climb the mountain many times, that you read the Hobbit to me, that you played your guitar for me at night until I fell asleep and again in the morning when I woke up.  That you brought home a puppy and orchestrated a convincing meeting with Santa. That one year you dressed as Santa yourself even though I was too old to be fooled. That when I had chickenpox and couldn’t go out you brought home a deluxe dinosaur playset that entertained me for feverish itchy weeks of confinement. That you taught me to ride a bike and zipped me up inside your sweatshirt with you when I was tiny.

Today’s memory is neutral, possibly good. I can’t imagine why, but this memory returns to me often, shifts between ages. Could it be that this thing occurred more than once? Or is it remembering it so often and in different moods which has created variations?

I am in the white pick up truck in the parking lot of Sears Lumber. The yellow fields surrounding the parking lot are empty except for the bodies of naked black trees that jut up towards a slate colored sky. Clouds are layered upon more clouds achieving different shades of gray and blue and white and black, some smooth and some lumpy with the promise of rain, of thunder, of lightning.
The smell of moist earth. A special smell that has become familiar to me through the years, a smell that comes in late autumn and in winter after the rain has wetted the dead grasses and made its way to the heart of the clods of dirt that lie exposed. I have smelled it nowhere else but there in that valley that was home. I have smelled rain and wet earth and grass in other places since, but the odor is not the same.
Far away I could see the green and gold and red leafed tops of distant trees in distant fields. A crow perched on a lamppost cawed, a sound that I have heard in other places, the  harsh hallow voice of a big black bird.
The lumber store is the largest in a row of commercial buildings done in mocha hued stucco and wooden signs and beams painted dark chocolate. There is a little Mexican cantina that I have never been in, and a beauty shop, and empty shop windows where there are vacancies. All in all the strip has room for no more than five or six establishments.
The parking lot is vast and cracked and uneven, and all around it the empty fields yawn like a sea of grass interrupted only by the line of buildings in the east and Lakeshore drive in the south. Behind Lakeshore a wall of trees hides the view of La Laguna Grande, but it has not been called by that name for decades.
It is now Lake Elsinore, named for Hamlet's Castle Elsinore, and the town is named the same. The sea of grass is broken by buildings and trees off in the west, and beyond that the mountain sleeps under the soft blankets of clouds. Our house is over there, underneath the mountain, planted at its feet.
I look at the field, the clouds, the naked trees and imagine I am in some east coast village in some forgotten era. In a moment I will see a maiden in a hooded cloak rushing away from or towards some terrible danger, a basket dangling from her arm. In another moment I will be the maiden.
I have never been to the east coast, or anywhere at all other than this valley and the stretch of highway that leads to my grandparents' home in Phoenix, Arizona. 
In another moment it is a European copse, in another I am gazing upon the shire. These fields are ripe with magic. You can smell it in the air.  Or rather I have imposed the magic of my imagination over these  empty fields, and their smell has become special  by association.
I want to stay in the pick up and day dream. In one version of this memory I do. In another I go into the lumber store with you and am allowed to stand by myself looking with wonder at hardware while a pimple faced young man in jeans and a flannel helps you find whatever it is we have come here for.
In another version my little sister is here and she wears a flannel and jeans and our house is still under the mountain to the west, but it is no longer ours and we live in someone else’s house to the north.

All versions share the same sky, fields, parking lot, commercial building, and season. It is one memory which has expanded to encompass a few others for simplicity’s sake.
Memory is selective in every way. I have conjured this particular memory, or cluster of memories, on other days similar to today. On days when clouds gather and the light is exactly as it is now and I feel neutral. Some days the memories are angry, some days they are happy, others, like those arising today, are neutral, but almost all are laced with an undercurrent of sorrow and loss.
And you are always there, lending a back story to my emotional state, a conglomerate of memories that I call Father.

Unhinged Words

So beautiful I could cry. Friendship is a mysterious ephemeral thing. We all do know from experience that no one gives us anything for nothing. All has its price. And yet sometimes, rarely, once or twice in a lifetime, someone looks at us and their heart is so brimming with compassion that it spills out through their eyes and they offer us something that no one should offer; something so good one usually keeps it all to one’s self. True love, pure love, friendship, compassion. One in the same, these many words, these many unhinged words.
The sun peeks out for a while, then the sun goes away and there is cold again and gray mists. My life again. Wondering about the story of my life, how it will read, what it will awaken in the reader. Will my life bring others to life? Or will it go out like a light, extinguished with a clap so that only empty full darkness will remain? What has been done to us? Have we really done this ourselves? Betrayed ourselves so that we are no longer free?
No longer free to live. Another unhinged word. Free. Live. They have all come undone. They all mean nothing because they refer to experiences that we have never had, that our parents have never had, that someone, dear fool, did have and bursting with it endeavored to explain, to share by virtue of oral communication, spilling pearls out onto the grimy sidewalk before pig faced orphans that grabbed them all up and snuffled them and rubbed them in sweaty hands and passed them on to a new generation of piglets.
There are still a few fools rattling around out there, a few who have had the experience and then watered at the eyes realizing that they had said compassion, they had said love, they had said discipline, responsibility, freedom, but had never experienced it until this moment. And now in this moment the word means something, for the first time ever.
Can I give you an example? Can I give it to you now in writing…with words, some of which are still empty for me, and some of which are full?
Empty full darkness that clings to us on all sides. This one life, this one moment, perhaps infinitely more complex than we realize, like the insides of a pomegranate, can it be lit like a fuse? Make it bright, dazzling for a moment so that we can see the delicate tendrils that connect so much to so much else?
With pictures darling, with stories.
By seeing the woman sitting on the flat trailer bed in her red and white striped dress, singing, while the man drives the tractor round in circles. What does it tell you? The buildings are stretched squares making them rectangular and they are frosted with white stucco and pale blue stucco and the pigeons stand around kissing on top as though they were the adornment of a dirty wedding cake. The thick black power lines hang crossing and re-crossing over the streets, making the sky into a piece of modern art when viewed through the eye of the round boy in his stained white shirt and black pants looking up as the flock of pigeons flies from one frosted rooftop to the other, basketball gripped under his arm. There are iron bars on the windows and gates in the garages and front entry ways so that small brown girls stand behind them looking out like prisoners before retreating to ride pink plastic tricycles in the gloom. At the end of the street the chain link fence stands between the apartments and rows of head stones besieged by mustard yellow lichen, keeping company with decaying bouquets of both organic and synthetic flowers. A fence to protect the dead from the living, and a wide green lawn punctured by words, where memories go to slowly fade away. A mysterious, ephemeral thing. So beautiful I could cry.

The Center of All

The day begins frosted in mists that drift in from the sea, a persistent fog that wets the concrete of the front stairway and the sidewalk that leads to the BART station. It blocks out the sun and the blue of the sky with its homogenous hues of gray on gray. I find it difficult to rise. I find it difficult to accept that this is day, this is morning, time to throw back bed sheets and sing to the world the way birds do. The darkness seems to mute out the possibility for song. It welcomes heavy jackets and lethargy in July. It feels like an extended night. I bring in the paper which has thoughtfully been encased in plastic to protect it from the wetness. The weeds poking up out of the cracks in the driveway are a welcome sight. I can smell their green life on the moist air. I can smell the sea that I can’t see nestled under its blanket of fog in the far distance. If the briny blue won’t sparkle, what else can? I shuffle back inside and add the paper to a pile on the floor. It grew during my absence, that little mountain of news so important that no one bothered to remove it from its protective plastic covers.
I am not yet affected by any of these details. The blazing sun and trail dust and tall evergreens and shimmering sea and winding roads are still burning bright in my chest. My present surroundings are muted, less real than the internal landscape impressed upon me during my recent voyage. I resolve not to let this bleak world outside infect and obliterate the vivid world thriving within. It occurs to me that I might be able to change this place by holding tight to that other. If I will not let it bleed out of me, if I hold it boiling inside of me, perhaps, everything around me will be infected by me rather than the reverse.
I sit at the kitchen table to write my dreams. It is hard not to nod off as I write. The pen moves, my eyes close. My mind so focused on dreams begins to slip into their gossamer halls once again and begin new adventures spun from the fabric of the old. Then I rouse my self, and scribble less than I would say if I was speaking in the language of a dream, and put the little book half away. It occurs to me that I should hide it, for these are my dreams meant to be kept from uninvited eyes. The mere occurrence of some intruding peepers peering over those pages lined with the symbols that signify the landscapes and occurrences of my inner world would pollute my dreams, my shining, sparkling dreams filled with the beat and pulse of a great heart that I feel, that I hold but do not own. That heart, it owns me. So that it doesn’t abandon me, I must keep it secret, keep it protected from the ill intentioned and habitual prying of others.
I was in a place where the ground was carpeted with dust as dry as flour. In some places, the dust had blown away and what remained was a rock hard tanned skin so dry that it was cracked. In some places velvety patches of yellow sage crawled along, alive and happy in a heat that killed off other things. Some yellow straws protruded here and there like whiskers from a chin. The trees dropped red peppercorns and tiny dried leaves to make a carpet of pink within stone lined paths around their trunks. They too thrived in the sun and the dry. Their skin was cracked and rougher than the earth, but the leaves on their limbs were green and these bowed over to lend shade as graciously as the limbs of any river willow. They’d brush my face and hair with those many delicate fingertips and shiver gaily in the evening breeze. Lizards shot like rocket ships over the terrain, made quick by the warmth. Hills rolled like brown waves all around me, their soft curves radiating some silent love reciprocated by the bright blue sky. Beaches of hot sand and smooth stones crawled out of the forest to kiss the waves. Tiny villages clung to the folds of mighty mountains and glowed with tender light when night invaded those folds with cold penetrating fingers.
All of this I have stored down in my bones, a magick elixir stopped within an ivory vial. It is my very marrow. Holding the skeleton of scenes together lie the winding roads, like sinews of muscle and tendon, the curving path between earth and sea. The road that binds all things. The glowing water of life, blue when the sun is high, gold when it begins to sink, and inky black when it is gone. The smell of salt. The fragrance of trees and ferns, of rushing streams and cascading falls. On my right hand; the immovable. On my left hand; the ever turbulent, both pressing me into a fine line, a path between the two. A passage between chaos and stability that is my eternal home, not a place of rest but a journey that is the center of all.
I am a margin between worlds, one dark and cool, one bright and warm, and I must be the mediator.