Moments after my eyes have opened the finer details are already evaporating like rain on summer-hot asphalt.
Covet. That's all I can make of it. Not my house, not my husband, not my children. Just covet, and my old friend Regret.
I've washed artificial hot pink dye from a tiny feather and he takes a pair of jeans from the dryer, puzzled at the bubblegum mess. This is Emily's house. Her children. Or at least the youngest one that he's calling Chuckie, even though I know her name is Phoenix. I was there when she was born and a sick silence fell over the room because we knew something was terribly wrong.
He is her husband. A beautifully sculpted man with the face of an Irish actor, initials JRM. I've been certain for years she doesn't notice the geometric perfection of his cheekbones, or the sharp angle of his jaw. Convinced also that she doesn't appreciate the graceful lines of his neck, or even notice the space where clavicle bones meet and form a hollow. But I have. Along with the light fading from his eyes with each new child born, I've watched hope and will to live drain effortlessly away.
The front of the house gives away nothing of what lies behind it. It fact, it could be any other mill house in my own neighborhood. There's a wide porch and a dusty yard sprinkled with toys and children that I take to be his and Em's, and maybe a few cousins. I watch a strange dog for a few minutes until it comes too close, then call the children inside. I think that's when the feathers and bubblegum happen before giving way to the other side of the house and the next dream sequence.
The other side of the house is another world entirely. The property appears to back up to a lush, green golf course and there's a promenade that denotes where the property ends and an almost open air market/fair type scene begins. In all directions are magnificent views. A rocky drop into a forested valley. An empty meadow stretches out for miles and ends at a distant hill top with an enormous, white, alien antenna tower that looks like a metal tree. It has an art deco statue of a female at the top center and she is framed by the white metal branches. In another direction the city lies below and I see it the way I used to see Phoenix from atop Camelback Mountain, sprawling and safely muted.
I'm walking along the colonnaded vista of the back porch taking polaroids of myself and the art deco goddess on signal hill because she and I are transitive verbs that no one has given a name to. Like a virus on the verge of being discovered that will destroy whole populations before a name, much less a cure, can be found.
It's night now and the golf course has become the ocean. I'm barefoot in wind blown white gauze. The silent scream inside my head is static transmissions- the only way she knows to communicate. She is me, and has descended the celestial beacon of her alien antenna tower to walk into the ocean, taking a nameless plague with her into eternal sleep at the bottom of the Atlantic.
11:12 a.m. - 2016-07-30
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