Dreams
Someday again I’m going to walk into a coffee shop. I’m going to order the drink least likely to spike my anxiety. Probably an iced decaf Americano. A little bit of oat milk.
I’ll be wearing clothes without an elastic waistband. Maybe a shirt with a real collar. And I’m just going to sit down. I’m going to sit down and I want the coffee shop things that sometimes happen to go on.
I want to be transported back to a day where I was apprehensive that I hadn’t heard back from the person I was dating, but suddenly the room was overtaken with revelry in a tiny shop where seating was at a premium and my best friend joked about me ordering the most pain-in-the-ass drink and we sat and talked and we listened to old men revel in the live music they were playing, seated at tables in the middle of the coffee shop. I’ll get a slice of pizza afterward, though slice may be a misnomer for the brick shape.
Or maybe I’ll be the quiet one in a room of conversation, a book in hand. Maybe it’ll be Ursula Le Guin. It was once before. The Dispossessed. I’ll use it as my way to force myself to read, to find joy in reading. I’ll get carried away to distant stars. I’ll wander a little down for a chocolate banana pastry that always calls my name. I’ll wonder down to another shop, about to close, keep on reading the book as I sit at the tables they now have packed away but still outside, as if to taunt people.
Or maybe I’ll take a seat on a porch — I suppose I could do that now — and take in everything around me and cough a little when the pollen hits my nostrils, but the cough is nothing specific or scary. It just is.
Maybe I’ll be at a bar room again. I’ve barely been in those my entire time in California. I can’t find the dimly lit and the cold domestic “Gatorade beers” to jump into after a few nice ones. Or it’s a whiskey soda. Or a whiskey neat. It’s been since Nebraska that I’ve had those. I was working at a bar then, and after I cleaned the bathrooms drink my late night shift drink.
Maybe I’ll be in a place with music. I want seated, but I’ll settle for standing. Something loud. Or something quiet. Who knows. I want it to be something worth it, something worth all the effort to make it happen. I want a friend by my side and a merch table full of things I’m on the periphery of getting but decide against.
Or who knows, maybe I’d take a sweaty basement punk show again, the man in plaid in a sea of black, watching some local bands play earworms I may never hear again. Do they even have a Bandcamp? There will be one song I won’t remember.
Maybe I’ll get a little bit high and go to a pretentious performance piece that ends up hitting me more than I thought it would.
Maybe I’ll be in the hillsides with friends, a slow crawling hike to destinations unknown, a little lost, but at least remembering how to get back. I’ll find myself in a field of odd plants covered in lichen and maybe a fungus and, in my weird state of mind, find it feels like a corner of death in the midst of life.
Maybe I’ll just be in a friend’s living room. We’ll hug. The hug will be longer than we’ve hugged before because it’s been too long. I might cry a little. I let a little out as a release valve now and then.
Or maybe I’ll be idly combing thrift stores for some buried treasure. Or I’m at a tacqueria alone, plate of tacos and two Dos Equis with lime. Or a movie theater, cooler than my apartment. Do I want existential dread or punchy superheroes? It’ll be a Tuesday, the cheap night, and dinner is an entire bag of popcorn.
There’s a lot of maybes, no real probablies. Maybe I could hop in my car for a point unknown, or find a beach with real parking to hear waves crash and bask in my smallness.
Maybe I’ll see my nieces again, and the one most like me will jump into my arms and we’ll hug and she won’t want to be let down. My parents will make sure there’s biscuits and gravy — fresh gravy, tube biscuits — one morning for breakfast and a small batch of hot sauces there waiting for me.
They’re as much fantasies as anything else. Sure there are the fantasies of people, real people, in the flesh. But the places. The places count. The light, the smells, the tactile feeling. A cool drink. Or maybe a warm one. Maybe I’m with a friend. Maybe (ha) I’m with a date. Maybe (ha) I’m making new friends.
But this isn’t reality. Reality is where we screwed this up. Reality is where you can see your best friends but not touch them. Reality is where your dreams take place in vague or distant settings because you’ve run out of stimuli.
Maybe I’ll feel more than passively alive.
Maybe it’s 2022. I’ll be 38, facing down 40, wonder how I got where I did. But maybe it’s where I feel a certain kind of alive again. And it’ll feel nice.
***
No furniture items this week. I wrote this in a break from packing.