the air we breathe
I had a dream a few nights ago that my daughter, Mila, was a baby again. I lived in a weird house that didn’t quite fit together. Everything quaked and shifted below my feet, floors buckled, the windows were askew with no glass like hungry mouths stuck open. Nothing made sense. Walking from one room to another was a maze that brought me to a different time and iteration of myself. Stairs pointing up brought me down and the threat of something ominous loomed close behind.
I have this dream every time I dream now - the weird house part that is. Every time I’m in a building that rotates like a Rubik’s Cube in the hands of some tyrannical giant that amuses himself with my increasing panic as I realize I’m trapped. I don’t have any tools to figure it out. Nothing I try works. I just loop around to my starting point or continue from strange room to ever more stranger room.
What was different in yesterday’s dream was that Mila, my youngest born that has been dead for four years now, was there as an infant - soft and round and smooth, and she was kidnapped from me as I tried to navigate the riddle unfolding around us. She was stolen and nobody would help me.
I know nobody really likes to hear about other people’s dreams. Dreams mostly hold their interest with the tether of emotion they evoke in the dreamer themselves. I probably wouldn’t have shared this part here at all if it wasn’t for what came the next day.
After breakfast there is coffee. My husband, Troy, and I sit on our sofa, now with the necessary wood stove chugging in combat against autumn’s cool air that slinks in through the cracks and walls of this old house. I read to him. Presently we’re rereading, “East of Eden”. A favourite of both of ours and a book I gave to Mila years ago to read.
I picked up the book and read the final paragraph of the chapter we had left off on. As I turned the page I found a small pink square of paper with a love note I had written