draft one
lit-fiction.
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There wasn't even enough light to make any cheer out of the orange and greens of the stained glass hamburger in the window. Then again, she was always taking north-facing windows for granted, it was 6:47 in the evening. It was Monday. She'd barely strayed from bed, it was snowing out and she thought emerging today would go against her better judgment. She was certainly on edge. Through the crack of unobstructed window she could make out very small white flakes slowly drifting down. The sky was somewhere in between white and grey, the entire sky was a solid sheet that looked so cold it made her shiver from under her covers; cirrostratus clouds. The birds were quiet today. There were no shadows.
That night she'd had three odd dreams. She never dreamed, or at the very least you could say that she rarely remembered a dream. Today, three vague ghostlike traces of recent dreams were quietly consuming her.
This morning she felt rested. Despite the fact that she'd had ample sleep over the past weekend, she didn't want to move or get out of bed. She had to stop rushing all the time. The summer was the only time she really truly got to enjoy taking care of herself, one and only. In the summer of 2007 she first (re)discovered the pleasures of a bed and room of ones own and of lingering in bed. In the late fall she'd learned the pleasures of the bedroom as cocoon, she really began to inhabit her space. Precious space; rest, peace, quiet, privacy. No other worries, time to tend to herself, and the two months barely gave her enough respite to keep it together the rest of the year. That was of course exactly what she was thinking about as she vacantly stared out the window when the phone rang and the incessant barking of her elderly dog outside in the yard below brought her back from her time traveling mission. She was never gone for long, or very far.
Back to her dreams: in one dream--though she couldn't recall the chronology of the dreams, nor their entirety this was the last of the three--she was trimming her pubic hair with a pair of scissors. She trimmed it, as she always had, for her own purposes and to her own liking. No shame in that, she wasn't going to be waxing for anyone so all she felt she had to do was trimming and maintenance. Just as she was dreaming of snipping away at the short and the curlies, she stirred awake. Opening her eyes, she glanced at the clock and within a minute, or seven, he called. She was always happy to hear from him and answered the phone with a chipper "good morning".
After a few minutes they hung up and she decided to face the day. She headed down the stairs, into the kitchen, and proceeded to make a full 8 cup pot of coffee. It wasn't until later on, when she was back in bed with her coffee, that she recalled the dream and how odd it was that he had called just minutes after she had this dream. The phone call hadn't struck her as odd until a few hours later on. Even then, she did not want to dwell on something that was probably only on her mind due of her own proclivity for histrionics, anxieties and neurotic tendencies. However, it was later on she started to get a sinking feeling right at her core. On days like this she knew she would have to be diligent just to keep breathing. That always seemed like an overwhelming task to wake up to. Too, it was when he sent her a text message in the afternoon asking about a detail from the night before; how many times she said she called and what his phone was telling him. Odds and sods, circles. What was the underlying issue? She found it hard to believe that he was troubling himself with the kinds of odds and sods he outright disapproved of her for concerning herself with.
After she checked her email and read his replies from the previous day's round, she knew there was a problem. Maybe it wasn't 'just her.' or, maybe it was? She needed to trust herself, and continue on her day and stop fretting about these petty points. "Moving forward, moving forward. Prochain," she thought to herself as she straightened up in her bed to check her smile. She found it intact and hoped it would stay. For the moment, what she sensed could be described best by saying that she felt as though her smile were dangling on some 'precarious precipice,' clinging to her with duct tape and twine. After all, it was probably the weather. It almost always was. She texted him a quick "is something wrong?" She had chosen to phrase it that way rather than the more ambiguous "are you ok?" His reply read simply, "later." Later what? Later...her mind started to jump and kick and get way ahead of itself. She hadn't done anything wrong so there was no reason to get all whatwhat, go bugfuckbananas and have a gloomy doom doom grey day waiting for the whatwhat. There was no way she was going to fall back into that nasty old trap, whatever it was, they'd discuss it later. For the moment she was wearing several layers and a scarf in bed; lonely, cold, sleepybrains and all.
The second dream had to do with a car wash. One of those drive through places where you stay in the car. That dream was mashed up with a dream of sleeping, with him, in her bed. They were laying there in bed, fast asleep. Her feet were tucked up between his knees and calves, their right hands clasped held crossed in close across their hearts and tight and safe. His left hand was nestled snug between her thighs resting in the warmth of her snatch. Her fingers lingered drowsily, barely touching his sleeping neck. Her fingers had long released from the habitual twirling of the hair at the nape of his neck--something she found herself doing quite often and found extremely comforting. Thinking back on the dream, she suddenly felt a heaviness in her chest as her entire being relaxed into the sense memory of sleeping next to him in that very way, as they had done so many nights. The car wash was some carry over from a television program she'd seen earlier the previous day. In the dream she was dreaming of dreaming the car wash; this device in is often referred to as "mise-en-abyme" meaning roughly "dream within a dream."
Before she could get to writing anything down about the third ghost of a dream she was interrupted, distracted, ejected from her bed, in order to tend to her child and sorting through post-camping debris. She, of course, forgot what the third dream was that had haunted her just before. It was so vague now she doubted it had ever existed at all. Perhaps it was the trace of someone else's dream that was tagging along as though dream's ghosts traveled like schools of fish, or traces that had merely tickled the inside of her skull and evaporated forever.
When she finally sat down to write, the third trace had completely gone leaving a few bars of piano in it's wake. She recognized it as one of his songs. She didn't know how to play it, or what the notes were, or even what key it was in. Then, after a while longer she began to doubt she was even certain what song it was as it began blending in with her dreams and memories getting lost forever in that grey day space and time. Soo, songs--his songs--began to pile up one on top of another until they blended and she could only make one out, which she began to hum to herself. She laid down under her covers and closed her eyes and tried to imagine his body there with hers, touching close. Through the covers, the light cast a warm red glow. She breathed the stale air and began to feel unwell. Even if she were to dream of car washes, and only car washes, for the rest of her living days and sleeping nights that was where she'd rather be; cozy and warm.
