Wednesday, October 14, 2009

How Do You Tell a Dream?



I just wrote a political piece and deleted it. It's not what I do here. This is a place away from all of that. Sometimes, though, it is difficult. Really difficult. But I shall remain a voice from the ether. This site is just a Fairy Tale.

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I've been trying to write about my college life, too, but it is difficult like trying to tell someone about a dream or trying to explain your emotions. It was like that. I walked around day and night swollen, excited. Everything was new, every place enchanted. The people I met had traveled, had been to Europe and beyond. I'd never known anyone who'd been to Europe before except some fathers who'd been in the war. But people like us didn't just go to Europe. I made new friends who spoke other languages. We barely spoke one. I ate foods for which I had no names. Some days, I would eat with the Hari Krishnas on the Plaza of the Americas where they came like missionaries, passing out food and literature and chanting and praying in their saffron robes and ruby markings. Jesus Christ, I thought, if my father could only see this. There were endless acres of playing fields, tennis and racquetball courts, swimming pools and gymnasiums, luxuries I had never seen or known. I sat in an old stadium style auditorium for my organic chemistry class. The front of the classroom was covered with blackboards which the professor covered with chalk marks of chemical formulas that went on and on forever, formulas that I could follow and understood. I wanted my old friends to see me there, wanted them to see me in that seat like I was in a movie, wanted to let them know that all those mystical markings made sense to me. There were movies on the lawns at night where mellow crowds gathered under twinkling skies with heavy blankets and woven baskets, the smell of pot heavy in the air. You could do anything, it seemed, anything you wanted to at all, and everyone was brilliant and beautiful. I floated just above the ground, suspended, holding my breath afraid it would all disappear, all fade away, afraid that Irving or Frankie or Russell would show up and start in with their shit and ruin everything. They didn't or they couldn't though, I wasn't sure which, but like Sarty in the Faulkner stories I had not yet read, I knew this was greater than their crippling violence, was greater than anything I had ever known before, and I wanted it.

How do you tell that, though? Nothing happened, really, though at the time it seemed like everything.

3 comments:

  1. You did tell it...perfectly! I felt it as I read it.

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  2. you do a great job on telling us how nothing feels like something :)

    keep on rocking the free world
    d

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  3. Thank you. I like that--telling how nothing feels like something. Yes man.

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