The Magic City

When we met you made it clear you weren’t staying long you said you wanted to go to the airport, (which was the best place to meet people) meet a girl and go wherever she was going. Just leave. I believed you but figured you wouldn’t be going that soon. Now looking back I imagine what life would be like if you had. I wouldn’t Google search you and find you had been arrested possessing crack you might be living in Hawaii or Vancouver two of your favorite places so natural.  Your mom would be quietly pleased.

 

I sleep to resurrect people sometimes. Sometimes it is the only thing I can be certain of that familiar faces of my past will be there with me as I dream impossible combinations. Usually when I have these dreams it is not a current me that I see but an old younger me happier much clearer and the people are content too brought back to life unscathed from circumstance. There is a utopian quality to this type of dream.

 

You told me you were leaving and the truth was you already had a flight booked. I can’t listen to the Nightmares on Wax CD or The Grouch without knowing why we intersected; our shared hatred for phoniness and inability to conform. We could have lived like that forever sick and afraid, suspended in time, paralyzed by the outside world. But I had another plan and my flight had already been booked too, so to speak.

 

It was probably comforting that I was crazier than you and you could worry about me surviving just as I did for you. That crazy poetry girl in thrift store clothes holding a notebook as a shield and weapon when the truth was I had already been hurt more than anyone would have been able to by that time. A devout believer in Anne Sexton, and Malcolm X. Passionate to tears and fits of anger everyday. I couldn’t maintain a job or a bank account, parallel-park, or even make it to class one week straight. You could worry about me surviving, making it in this big world. I was your distraction. Like a hurricane in your head you could not dismiss my power.

 

Everyday I blow dry my hair and carefully plan what I am going to wear and hope that I will be able to connect with the words in my head and I see that I am phony just the way I hoped I would never be thinking that I can be both a writer and a corporate slave simultaneously. Sometimes we have to make compromises. Logic appears. Saves us.

 

I sleep to bring people back into my life the way I want them and most of the time the life is completely different so much that I almost can’t recognize the person from my past. I had a dream that you, me and my best friend Alex were camping somewhere amazing and playing with a dog and taking pictures of the view as it sparkled under the blue sky. A magic city. We were probably around 19 or 20. I was telling Alex that I worried about you.

 

One day you’re smoking a blunt, drinking a 22 and writing on freeway overpasses and the next day you’re pathetic, you’re gone.

 

I overheard a side conversation at my birthday party between my mom and a friend. He said he always dreams about a mutual friend that recently died and my mom said “Veronica does too” and for a second between beers and bullshitting I thought about the way dreaming brings things to the surface but murkiness covers everything and it is too unclear to take seriously. Like looking at your feet standing on the edge of a dark river. I thought of the way I dreamt my grandma wealthy and driving an expensive car. It was a vision diametrically opposed to the truth where she rode the bus and was on welfare. I try to hold on to dreams when I wake up. Scramble to remember every detail but they slip.

 

One time when I was about five years old I really, really wanted a Popple, the popular plush toy of the time, I had a dream that I had one and when I woke up I looked on the dresser and expected it to be there but it was not. It was a dream. Later I got one but it didn’t have that anticipation and beauty that the dream one did, fluffy and bright. But that is just it. A dream.

 

I think sometimes I have built too many monuments to the past with my writing that I have tried to answer too many rhetorical questions by way of practical prose. I think of where you were when I met you, ready to jump and I stopped time for a little while for a couple of perfect days. We could see the existence of humanity in a magic city where a kick flip off the City Hall steps and a perfect sentence were our only goals, distractions.

 

 

Each night I patch the holes, make them all whole. I remember what was and I move forward.