I. My mother once had a dream about the blue hour and I spent many evening car trips with my cheek against the cool glass of the window and asking her “is this the color of the sky in your dream?” To which she would reply in gradients: a few shades darker, a few shades lighter. It became my own personal mythology. The blue hour in winter lasts ten minutes, but when I’m walking home I think about my mother’s dream and it feels like a dream that I had. Then my breath freezes and the streetlights come on and the sky gets dark.
II. You know the way the atmosphere can seem thick and the sunlight comes like its being reflected in honey? And everything you look at turns orange and gold? Distances fading to sun-ghosts and loosing their edges? More than once I stood in a field and watched the waves of light break over the summer grass and roll off into the trees. When the light is that way it looks like there’s no such thing as winter or cold beds or questions or death or war. Do you know what it is like to stop your car on the side of the road and watch the sun break itself on your bare shoulders? I think you do.
III. The worst night was the time I cut both my hands on the ice and snow near the porch of someone’s house in New Paltz, NY. I will tell you about it with surgical precision: it was the kind of ice that forms after the temperature gets over thirty during the day then freezes at night into a sharp crust; two week before Christmas 2009. I had been drinking hard; I had already cried but swallowed it down. I fell through the ice and cut up both my hands. I didn’t go home. I drank gin straight from a cup that had already been used and left by someone else. I told someone that I loved him. I didn’t, but neither did he. Words dripped out of my mouth, I still didn’t go home.
IV. That’s not the only time I did those things. Sometimes it was worse. I lost my shirt once. I lost some friends too. I pretended like I was high when I wasn’t. I got scared of the police in the back seat of a car while my friends told me to stay cool. I thought about dying in a VW bus that was swerving down a small mountain loaded with stupid kids loaded with drugs and I was sober and thought about how the paramedics would pull our bloated bodies out from the wreckage. Rough patches. I imagine growing up was hard for you too sometimes. Let’s not talk about it.
V. Just give me the benefit of the doubt.
VI. I could have been a cello player but I was too restless and I quit. I imagine you could have been something too. Perhaps the trumpet or the drum. Maybe you sing. I can imagine you with a little boy’s bowl-cut squirming on a piano bench as a Ms. So-and-So played scales over and over with her pale cigarette fingers. And you let your eyes wander off to the bay window where the strong and true July sunlight was shining and you thought about a stick you found that morning that was the perfect shape and weight of a rifle and how the neighborhood boys were running through the streets making POP POP noises at one another. “Pay attention!” You tear yourself away from the glorious blue outdoors and place your fingers on the ivory keys.
VII. Sometimes I think love is a rare and flawed thing; perhaps a kink in our genetic makeup. I think about the past twenty-three years of people telling me that I am pretty and they don’t understand why I can’t find someone because I’m nice and smart and interesting and not strung-out on drugs. Sometimes it hurts when people touch me, even if it’s the cashier handing me a receipt, and a voice in my head asks me how will you ever be enough for a man when you hate brushing up against strangers on the train? I’m truly sorry for telling you this, you can leave if you want. It won’t hurt my feelings.
VIII. Did you have a dog as a small child that you loved as fiercely as a small child can? Was it named Bruno or Max or Buddy and did it flop down next to you in the grass on hot summer days panting with pure and simple and absolute joy? Did it swim in the lake near your house and run with you along the long white fence in your yard? Did it get out one evening through the back door and not come home all night, even though you stayed out past one in your pajamas with a flashlight calling Bruno! Max! Buddy! Did your father find it’s body on the side of the road in the morning, dry brown eyes, broken legs, tongue hanging out on the asphalt? No? That’s good, none of that happened to me either.
IX. In every nightmare I have ever had I am running away from something. I am going to the bank and taking out my savings account in cash, I am stealing a car and driving to Walmart in a strange city to buy platinum hair dye, new clothes, and sunglasses. I am going to the airport and buying a ticket to Canada, where I will go to a different airport and buy a ticket to an undisclosed location where no one can trace me. On a related note, do you ever have a dream in which you are deeply in love with someone and when you wake up you reach out for them but find you are alone, and everything seems hollowed out and your life seems like it has become the dream?
X. Wake up, it’s your turn.