A Haunting Sadness
The dreams now are painful and violent; they awaken me with a deep ache I can’t touch and a cotton-dry mouth. A few times I’ve woken up crying. That’s a shitty way to start the morning.
They are no longer memories of running shirtless through hayfields in golden sun and blue-sky days or swimming naked in the ponds. The dreams now are echoes of stark and raw sadness. I think at times I try to turn the sadness into anger, but it fails and falls back to sadness. Sometimes I think that sadness may be where my comfort resides. As if the only way back to that place I need to find is to swim through a deep well of sadness—and that’s oddly, and somehow, alright.
I’m resolved that I’ll never forget that place. It is nothing more than dust now, bulldozed and buried, paved over and eradicated. I could have survived knowing it was sold and some other farmer’s cows were in the fields, chewing on the purslane and lambsquarter weeds out there by the scary, snake-infested ponds; but it’s not like that. It’s not like anything it was before.
My dreams are a haunted lament for that world that I’m sure once existed, but I can no longer find. I’m told it’s dangerous to look back in time through the lens of nostalgia, and I don’t argue that, but there are some things worth the pain of missing them.
Last night the boy ran through the frosted muck—the color of semi-sweet chocolate, frozen and swollen up so the ice has been forced out the top of each dollop—and it crunched under his boots. He whips and whirls his way through a dense, hoarfrost-covered thicket. Brambles and thorns cut into his skin and slap his face as he tries to outrun the enveloping darkness.
October has slammed closed like a great wooden door on summer, and the failing light and cold of November bites with a bitter wind. He runs faster, but his destination continues to pull away, until at last he crests the big hill and sees the light glowing over the edge.
Breathless and writhing and finally over the top, the boy’s feet slip on the frozen snow dusting; he falls. Dropping to the ground in an icy belly flop, pillars of dancing flame reach up near the stars and wash out the moonlight. Face down and hiding in the weeds and frozen muck, he sees the farm engulfed, but not consumed—just perpetually burning. The barn and the old farmhouse and the toolshed howl in the darkness, releasing the souls and memories trapped within their walls. The searing heat burns his face.
Powerless and hopeless, he watched it all burn. The rage of the fire changes, perhaps fed by the wind or far too many recollections. The souls that called this place home are freed and, before his eyes, it all collapses into rubble and ruin. The monster fire, no longer content to tease, consumes it all to the last stick and nail and abandoned cup and old shoe left in that mudroom off the kitchen.
He watched it burn with a young boy’s eyes and an old man’s aching heart, and he fell asleep in the frost and the mire. When he woke, he looked around and it was as if it had never existed at all. And the boy lost sight of his ground and station and place. Not homeless, but without a home, he never woke up again
That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.
Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!
Bill
There are some things worth the pain of missing them 💓