Did I dream?
you dreamed about me
“On the floating, shapeless oceans,
I did all my best to smile,
’til your singing eyes and fingers,
drew me loving into your eyes.”
Song to the Siren.
The song rushes through me, sending waves of memory into the pores of my skin. To those deeper parts of me. I sit back, eyes closed, letting the music flood. Images, sights, smells, tastes. I taken in the overwhelming collision of what is now, and was then.
We are driving over the bridge from San Francisco to Oakland. The sun is going down and I carry a child inside ofr me that I’m yet to know about. I want to say so many things to him, out loud. But, I’m trapped in my own silence.
I sit and watch the water go by. I let you drive my car. I let you lead the way.
I look at the bridge railing as we pass it and wonder what it must be like to jump off - to fly, for a moment, and then end.
“And you sang, ‘sail to me, sail to me
let me enfold you'. Here I am, here I am.
Waiting to hold you.”
Memory shift to another place, a night in forward time, but back. We had been there before, at different locations, but the name the same. That night it was Chinatown. I remember a red staircase, and her footsteps behind. I felt drunk already, but I hadn’t had even a sip of anything.
She smelled of sandalwood and Studio One hairspray. She sat close to me. So close I could feel the tremor of her breathing, in and out. I could feel prickles on her skin, a mimic of mine, as the cool air whooshed over us from a high above vent. She looked up, half-closed eyes, whispering, slurring her words - playing at something not quite true.
“Josh thinks you should kiss me,” as if Josh had anything to do with us. But we didn’ know how do deal with this kind of confrontation, this version. So, I let her get away with avoiding, kissing her as Song to the Siren began to play. The pulse of sound surrounding us. The electricity of our lips sparking, flying.
Music is like this. More powerful than words, smells, pictures, postcards. The musing snaps us back, projecting a slideshow on the back of each closed eye. Beyond vision, the faces go by.
More than just the mere image, more than a photograph. It is a plunge into days past. Splash. Drop. Feeling there again, momentarily. The faces from the past, seeing them, in different ways.
Memory is like this. Changing, evolving, deflating, editing.
I see me, the me I was, in front of me, yet not. All of it just a reflectoin of who I am now, yet it is still me, backward, back then. I see similarities, nuances, my voice. I see the growth, sense it. The way I’ve left some parts behind, dropped them off a tall bridge, into the ocean depths. Left them on the side of the road, in a goodbye, or an old room.
It is like staring at oneself in a carnival mirror, distorted, but still you. It is still me, a me stuck still in a long lost siren’s song.
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