There's a place where only our dreams can take us.
I don't remember the dates, and sometimes I don't even remember the places, but I remember the dreams. The one with the train. That was the first I remember. Off the tracks and burning. Then the one with my little brother on his tricycle, and the truck that didn't stop. I remember the burned out landscape, and the sniper, and the feeling of the bullet tearing into my leg as I hid behind a chunk of flame kissed concrete.
I remember the spider webs. All around me, spider webs. Like a funnel when I ran, leading me forward, into nothing. I remember the huge glass window shattering, the phone book, thrown, hanging in the air. I remember Ami Archi, and the end of the world, and waking from the dream's dream into the nightmare I was dreaming.
I remember when Jason came to me, bleeding from his neck, where the knife cut. I remember it like it just happened, like it wasn't a dream. I can still see the shelves stretching away, and feel the bowling ball and the computer falling from my arms. I hear Alex yelling. I hear the gas hissing from the pipe, and the hinge on the front door at the summerhouse creaking. I see Jason again, and this time he brought people. I can see it anytime I want to, anytime I'm not careful. I can see them always.
Sometimes I wonder what friends see. I wonder what place Sean wakes up from. I wonder whose hands Alex feels just before waking. I wonder what John sees, what his dreams show him, what Jimmy and Nanajiji said to him. Sometimes I wonder.
There's a place where only a dream can take us.
I remember the dives, the deep blue and the statues. I can see them, floating, sunken. The water is Caribbean aqua, the statues are eastern, and I can go anywhere. I remember the horses. Backs, manes, dust, hoofbeats. I can still see the mountainside, the whole group sitting, and John, his arm raised to go across my shoulder. I can hear, in the echo, what he said to me. And I remember the zombies, and the beach, and Anna Pelrine. I remember how the helmet came open, and just where the Southern Cross gave way to the bible black, and the feel of the wind rippling the hair on my arms, my legs. I can smell the Pacific Ocean. Is it strange, to remember the texture of a dream?
There's a place where only a dream can take us.
I spend my day making phone calls. We laugh at each other, across the office, when there's a line that merits. "Well, you know, education's one of the biggest reasons I'm supporting Barack." "So, does that mean you're a fan of corruption in government?" We laugh, and we joke, and we clown. But there's a reason we're here, for peanuts or nothing. There's a reason that we spend 13 hours a day, every day, in an abandoned mail store, where the last tenant left the letters hanging on the walls, letters we've cannibalized, leaving incoherent sounds hanging. There's a reason we get up, every morning and come here.
There's a place where only a dream can take us.
The irony is that I came here, looking for a dream. But I'm sure they'd tell me, sometimes you have to look for a dream to find one. When I was twelve, John taught me the tricks. You write something on a piece of paper, put it under your pillow. You make a deal with a friend that you'll meet him somewhere. And when you wake up, you stay in your favorite position. When you wake up, you don't open your eyes. Not till you have it by the tail. Not till it's there and solid in your mind. "A dream that you don't look at is like a letter you never open."
There's a place where only a dream can take us.
Kennedy took us all somewhere. Too high to see with the naked eye, and long after his brain was splattered on his wife's dress, on the backseat of a Cadillac convertible, we're still aching, still reaching. One man's dream can shape a nation, reshape it, change everything. It can change the way we see ourselves, the way our dreams reach us. Sometimes you have to go looking. Sometimes, it takes an eternity of wandering, day after day of thirst in the desert. Sometimes I have to write bad metaphors, one after the other, tired and flogged, to get to my one good sentence, to find one honest thing worth saying. But there's a place only a dream can take us. It isn't a dream of a quick fix, for me. It isn't a dream of fair education, or healthcare, or foreign policy that isn't hatched up in a game of Risk. I'll take all those, but that's not it. For me, it's a dream of a bigger future. It's a dream that I can someday tell my nephew, with his African father, his mother from the foothills of Colorado, that I can someday tell him, when he's old enough to hear me, that he can be anything. It's a dream that his world will be open as mine feels, as open as the horizon when the sun comes up over the Mojave. And it's a dream that I can tell him I was there. That I was part of it. That I helped make it happen. Of course, it's also a dream that my horizon will be that broad, that my world will be that open.
There's a place where only a dream can take us.
