dream journal

Maybe it’s not going to get any better.

I’ll go back to Seville and pick the bitter oranges up off the cement and let the air crust up my eyelid corners and remember the difference between longing and wanting. It’ll be hot and humid like home but in a different, nicer way, like a tomcat spreading itself over a flat alley and catching honey sunlight. I’ll go on endless walks around the city, spiraling towards the center and find myself staring at the day-glo soccer fields and cold metal cafe seats collecting rainwater and the Zara displays showing hot pink miniskirts that someone far away had to make.

When I was embarrassed about the shape of my Easter dresses, my grandmother used to tell me that there was no such thing as “un-handmade” clothes, because every piece of fabric is touched at some point before it touches you. No such thing as a clothes-robot, stitching.

So, I could either take the pink and purple dress that she made or beg my mom to spend the money that she earned taking pictures of other families for something more perfect from a stranger. I would look down at my GAP t-shirts and imagine someone like Grandma making it, arthritic hands bowing over their machine. And even now, I still sometimes find myself whispering “thank you” to the seams. To the person I don’t know that I’m using up even though I know better.

I dream a lot these days. It’s often disturbing.

Maybe the Adderall or the lack of sunlight warps my thoughts or my brain has just given up on finding anything better to do, so it replays thriller movies that I’ve forgotten about, inventing new ways to make me uncomfortable.

The last one was about how I got kidnapped and forced to marry somebody I didn’t know, except I probably did, because I read somewhere that you never dream of a face you haven’t seen in real life. It didn’t focus much on my dream-husband, whose features stay cloudy, even now. Mostly, I was concerned about the baby I was giving birth to and then holding against my chest. Blonde hair like mine and milk-soft skin. Holding her in some strange dream-country, wondering where my own dream-mother was.

I wish I could dream about something happy. I wish I could get the same kind of sleep I got when I conked out at a movie theatre in Seville. I was seventeen and the sun beat down on us outside, so we all scraped up the necessary euro and filed in, catching the tail-end of Pirates of the Caribbean before it rewound.

Instead of sitting on the plastic seats, I sprawled out on the concrete floor, cold against the strip of abdomen that my crop top revealed. That time, I didn’t have to try to doze off, because I was taken all at once by the surrounding dark and dubbed Jack Sparrow talking dialect.

I think that was the best I ever slept, and now that it’s happened, there’s no going back.