A Harsh Dream Of Reality

Not sure if it was Monday or Tuesday mrning, I can’t remember now.  You know how a dream clings to your eyelashes as you wake, but rides away on the first morning breeze.  Well, no matter which day it was, I had kissed the girl goodbye, and fell back to sleep for awhile.  Most days, if I wake up when the sun is out, I cannot reutrn to sleep until the evening.  Whichever morning this was, I defied all personal precedent.  I wish I hadn’t.

Back in sleep’s decpetively calm embrace, I started to dream again.  My usual night-time stories involve me hunting down bad guys, saving villages from monsters, or boring and terrifyingly uneventful tales of grocery shopping.  This particular morning, I dreamt of something that had actually happened in my past.  I do that sometimes.  I dream things that were real, and I dream them the way they happened.  It’s as if my mind was watching reruns of memory – I guess there was nothing better on.

As I wlaked through the frayed cotton whisps of slumnber, deeper into my own forest of memory, I walked into the trees.  They shot up all around me, densely reaching toward their nourishing mother, the Sun.  Birds fluttered on and off their outstretched branches, and various furry blurs scrambled about in the underbrush.  I was walking somewhere purposefully, but I had no idea of my destination.  I just kept at it in the sharp, long and indomitable gait which generally signifies my mood is not sunny.

There was no path; actually that’s a lie.  There was a trail, but I never took it.  I preffered to traverse the natural forest instead of ambling down the moats of dirt that had been cut to link each camp together, and separate the forest from itself in a spiderweb of empty ways.  I always felt the whole purpose of being there with these young men was to rip them from the harsh divisions and unnatural highways that drove men from one chaos to another and back.  That’s why I had always worked in the wildernerss immersion  department, instead of the outdoor living program.  Anyone can live outdoors, but to put yourself in the wild is to put yourself out and away from all that gnashes its teeth at our very nature and tears us into ribbons wrapped around forgotten posts.

When the trees thinned, I could hear the solid, insistent falls of my footsteps echo back to me from the clearing.  Sunlight, diligently searching for a spillway like a relentless river, eagerly plunged down into the clearing, casting a yellow spotlight.  Everything glowed with the hope and promise of a clear day after the rain.  Everything except Calvin.

He sat there, on the raw ground of the clearing, with his knees to his chest, and his gaze on a nearby rock that must have been utterly fascinating.  He didn’t hear me when I called his name at the edge of the trees.  He didn’t hear, or didn’t care, or both.  I walked in a few more steps and called again.  I knew he heard me, not through a response or a gesture.  I just felt him come back into himself, though the rock still kept his attention.  I stood there, silent, letting the sounds of the forest converse for us.

“Chief Dave, ” Calvin said to the rock.  “Why did they send you instead of the security guys?”

“No one sent me Calvin, I just heard them talking about what happened, so here I am.”

He slowly turned his head to me.  “How did you know I’d be here?”

“C’mon man, I may be an adult like them, but I’m not nearly as stupid.”

His lips smiled, but his eyes stayed a pair of lead weights holding his face down.  I asked if I could sit down, and with the typical teenage refrain of ‘I don’t care,’ I walked over to the slight, blonde haired, dirty-faced young man.  I sat a few feet away from him, facing the stream that ran along the far border of the clearing.  I glanced back at him from time to time, but said nothing for a long while.

“they shouldn’t have made me… “

“I know, Calvin.”

“They let Max out of it, and he’s a total assface.”

“I know, he certainly is.”

“it didn’t even matter what you said to them, they still let him skip the Interview.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t fair.  In fact, it was total bullshit.”

“They don’t listen to you much, do they?”

“Nope, I just know you kids really well, and couldn’t possibly know what might help or hurt.”

“That’s shitty, Chief Dave.  They ignored you on Max, and then did it agian with me.”

“Yeah.”

“You told them to let it go this time.  Fuck, man, I told them.”

“I know.  They have this deluded idea that it’ll help you to talk about it, even when you don’t want to.”

“Deluded?”

“it just means they don’t know shit.”

“Oh, well, yeah, that’s fur sure.”

I looked at him, The boy was not even fifteen yet, and he had killed someone.  He looked like a  child who was playing at being a scrawny skater punk.  His soft high voice could’ve fit in at any choir practice around., as a soprano.  Damn, just clean him up a bit, and he’d be a perfect little altart boy.  He may have killed someone, but he didn’t murder anybody.  He didn’t have it in him.

“Have you ever really talked about it; I mean, to anyone else.”

“No… who wants to hear about shit like that?”

“I did.  Some of them aren’t total losers, and they’d like to ehar about it too.  I know you’ve been fucked over and over, but there are a few people in the world who care, and want to help you heal.”

“Well, whatever.  Maybe I don’t want to heal… maybe I just want it to kill me.”

“If you meant that, you wouldn’t have talked to me by the fire last week.”

“Whatever, man.  I do mean it – for what I did, I deserve to…”

SSQQQUUUUUUUUEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKKKK!

I woke up suddenly, as Selma and Ling Ling notified me of their awful treat shortage.  I got up, rubbed the remaining rays of forest sunlight from my bleary eyes, and walked out to the fridge to get them some carrots.  The entire rest of the day I felt this pit of sadness in my stomach, rolling around like a pinball that weighed far more than it seemed.