Dream

I dreamed that I was tired, walking down the street in the kind of light that is just yellow enough for the mind to recognize that everything is dreamy - a little too white, the edges blurred - but not enough for conscious wakefulness. The world is a bit too surreal if this is real, and a little too real for the surreal, I think as I walk. I wonder where I am.

Actually, I know. I recognize my street. I am two doors away from my house. but my house isn't where it should be.. unless it is and I don't exactly recognize it. I mean that one there - the white one with the bushes out front. That's mine. Isn't it? Sure it is. I go in.

All of the walls are bare. Wow, I think, Rich has been busy packing our stuff - the mementos on the walls, the pictures of Paris and London, the crosses at the door that I didn't know exactly what to do with. All gone. All white. A canvas, but not so hopefuly as I know I will not recognize the new paint that will be there when I'm not.

But this is moving on, isn't it? This is part of the adventure - the falling away of the old and the introduction to the new that I distinctly remember signing up for when I started this part of my life. I should love it, right? So why is Jack crying? Why is he crying? Because I'm moving him away from all that he recognizes as his? From his neighborhood, his room, his Ms. Laura? But he's crying. Loudly.

And then I awake. Jack is crying; the explanation is that he's fallen down. He's ok. It was just a stumble. But I'm awake now. The surreal is vanished into a more concrete reality - the one where I've avoided packing the personal. The one where sometime soon I'll have to buck up and marry the comfortable past to the unknown future, one day at a time, one box packed and then another.