The Circus

My dreams last night were especially vivid and thought-provoking. I was on a tour package trip with my parents. The first day would be spent with a circus. I knew someone I once thought I could love, someone I haven't seen in a long while, would be on this trip . I felt a mix of dread and excitement and curiosity and indifference. That sounds an impossible combination but sometimes you care so much about something that you also just don't care anymore.

My agitation sent me out to the circus. It wasn't even a proper circus, more like a performance with singers and animals and a dirt floor. The headliner was an overblown, once-famous black woman singer, a woman who had sung the blues with great power and now lived inside them. She took me around backstage and talked to me in sentences that started with phrases like, "Now, I'm gonna be straight with you..." She was philosophical about her deterioration.

I wandered around, fascinated and distracted, until the afternoon performance was about to start, and combed through the crowd to sit with my folks on the lawn in front of the stage.

And there he was, sitting next to them...with what I suddenly knew in the eureka clarity of dreams was his fiance and her parents. And I sat down next to him and asked him how he was, as if we were acquaintances, since this other woman should not be made suspicious. He looked at me with misery in his eyes and said something I can't remember now, something like, I'm so unhappy. Then he leaned his head towards my chest, without actually moving close enough to touch me, as if he wanted to crawl into who I was an escape the people who surrounded us. I kissed him, carefully, on his head, as if to tell him I would let him.

I read over this and I have caught none of the intensity of it, the strange, dirty, road-weary performers, the presence of large bears and perhaps horses, or buffaloes, the self-mocking laughter of the blues singer who so clearly knew things I did not and amused herself with my naivete. I haven't captured how adrift I felt knowing I would see someone whose presence had once sparked such amazement, and whose absence left such a loud silence, like the absence of laughter for a joke you tell that should be riotously funny. And I haven't explained how his leaning and my kiss anchored something in me and in him, as if we both had returned home. Clearly he would marry the other woman, but she would never visit the part of him that rested there, in that moment, with me.

I woke up stunned. I think dreams are the subconscious' way of throwing out the trash, of forcing us to consciously confront the ideas that have been lurking in the shadows. Once exposed, they are destroyed.

I'm happy to dream of those I have lost, as it usually signals that my subconscious feels thoughts of them are taking up space and should be permanently removed.

But it may be a while before I shake that feeling of homecoming with someone I am not likely to see again.