I’ve been having these reoccurring dreams. Not daily, but just enough. In the dream she is there. We are family. She is always building, sculpting, creating; crafting a home, though never the house itself. Cooking. Curried sausages.
“Houses are easy” she would say. “Four walls. A roof. A lock on a front door. Mere things.”. And she was right; houses are no different to the old coffee table that sat in her grandparents’ lounge room for thirty years, or the ship her grandfather tediously handcrafted that perched upon it defending a time long passed. I could describe that ship to intricate detail. Funny what survives.
In this dream; Sunlight is caught in her hair as if she had captured the light its self. She moves through empty spaces with warmth and brightness. The most hollow of hearts could cease feeling empty under the calming stroke of her finger tips. A fold-out tent could become home, fit for a month. A swag becomes a day room. The passenger seat of a car becomes the entertainment quarters. I used to think that was a gift. Now I think it was a language she spoke that I never properly learned.
I remember the highways. Dust. Thousands of kilometres spent staring at horizons as though happiness lived somewhere over the next hill. The piercing light in our eyes as we drove west faster than the sun could set and went back in time with every date-line crossed politely.
Matthew’s farm. Esperance. Always another town. Another dirt road. Searching; endless searching. But her, it was simple; Apples. Books. A bikini top drying on the dash and a conversation. I once begged her to be quiet for just a moment or two. If only I had of known.
When we are young, we imagine regret arrives all at once. We believe it will come in a defining moment; lightning strike as we walk in the rain too close to the trees. But, sadly, it doesn’t. It arrives like fog creeping through a valley in the haze of a dawn.
One morning we wake up and realise that the very thing which we had spent years searching for was once firmly within our grasp: chasing us around the house trying to unbuckle our jeans. Asking how the day was. Falling asleep beside us as we wind on down the road in search for a great yonder which simply never existed; because that very moment was the great yonder. Existing in such ordinary perfection that we overlooked it entirely.
Hindsight is a cruel maiden.
I suppose there’s meaning in there somewhere; surely a reason she keeps returning in my dreams. I hesitate to believe it’s because I cannot let go.
Instead I think, perhaps, somewhere between these 135,786 kilometres, between the chaos and noise, the blood stains on the kitchen floor from the time I nipped my thumb dicing onions, and the years spent in absolute confinement; I finally understood what she was building.
In this dream; I reach for her, but she is a ghost. Air. Dust particles caught in the light stemming with the stale air in the room as I jar the curtains.
And I awaken. A morning wood pressed to the sheets, as if the simple thought of her incites the blood flow of a younger self. Yet, futile effort. I reach for her, seeking the warmth of her stomach on my fingers as she murmurs and turns away, pushing herself back into me.
Just a dream. I dream no more. For she has gone.
Not in any spiritual sense and certainly not in the departed from this earth travesty. But in the simple reality; in that confronting a freezing cold toilet seat in the middle of winter sense - the sharp reality of which: I had the world right there, but could not lift my eyes to see it.
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