10 — Dreams
of the most interesting kind.
"Other people’s dreams aren’t very interesting, usually."
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Sometimes I get the hankering.
You know the one: the hankering to fuck off into the sunset.
And disappear, because it’s all too hard and I’d rather be moving. I’d rather be on a train, in the passenger seat of a car, heading north and driving into mountains.
I’d rather be living a different life.
Away from all the people who love me, because it’s just easier to be alone sometimes isn’t it.
The antithesis of a room of one’s own is the family home.
I can’t disappear anymore, not like I used to: just pack my bag and be gone. That’s fine. We’re having building work done on the house. I’m a home owner these days, that’s all very interesting. When you own a house, it’s your final refuge, the place you get to keep the pointless tchotchkes and the boxes of drawings from when you were 5 (in the attic, so someone else will have to deal with them in years to come).
Being a homeowner means worrying about the mould and the damp and the crooked slate tile and whether that angle on the driveway is right and what to plant on a south-facing slope. It means I can’t just pack up my 35L pack (or the 60L if I really mean business) and disappear—sleeping bag liner, water bottle, books, notebook, camera, climbing shoes, three pairs of underpants and various technical pieces of clothing rolled into bologna slices.
My neighbour disappeared today. He doesn’t have kids, or a mortgage that I know about. He drove away in a Land Rover kitted out with a handmade wooden shelf in the back to sleep on.
As he was leaving, he hailed me.
“Hey, can I get your take on this? Does this look like a car with a mountain bike in it? Want to keep the thieves at bay.”
I had a look. There was a roof rack, with nothing on it but engine oil.
“No.” I said. “It looks like, if you had a mountain bike, it would be up on the roof rack. Is there a mountain bike?”
There was a mountain bike but it was cunningly hidden, in the car. He was pleased with my take.
And it was all I could do to restrain myself from climbing up in his passenger seat and saying, Jared, take me with you.
He’s going north, you see, to Scotland, to climb all summer and go to festivals in remote Scottish locations and do drugs probably and have sex under the stars.
Take me with you, I whisper.
—
When I get this feeling, there’s only one thing for it. Back to The Notebooks. Wring them out. There’s just so much in them, you see. Where were we? August 2008 right? Round about the time I was due for a scene shift.
—
I swear I’m getting back to August 2008 but first, some important business: it’s my birthday today and Joel’s getting me a new bike.
My old bike is a rusty three speed I inherited from an ex. It’s pretty slow and not very functional (kind of like the ex, come to think of it). That crappy bike was the most useful thing I got out of that relationship by a country mile. It’s definitely time for an upgrade, for my country miles.
We went to the shop to try to work out what size I am.
I told the lady in the shop I’m 5’10” and she wheeled out a bike that looked a bit small to my eyes.
Joel thought so too:
“I think that’s a bit small for her.”
“No, well, if she’s 5’10” she’s right on the edge. Could be this size or a bigger one.”
“I think the bigger one.”
“Hmmm. Have you got long legs?” She asked me.
“Yes.” It’s true. Most of my height is leg.
Joel chimed in. “Yeah, she’s got long arms and long legs but a short torso. Like a spider.”
Like a spider.
Like a spider.
That’s what he actually said. My boyfriend who loves me thinks of me fondly as a … spider.
I can’t say I think of myself as a spider. I don’t mind spiders, already mentioned I’m the member of this household perma-tasked with trapping-spider-in-cup-and-liberating-outside. But is it my spirit animal? Do I hard-identify with a spider? Not really.
I have an ex who did.
Actually, ex is a stretch. Older brother of a childhood friend I slept with once is more accurate.
He was an artist and his parents owned several floors of a building in TriBeCa. I guess they bought it back in the sixties when you could pick up old warehouses in lower Manhattan for a song and a dance. He lived in one of those enormous loft spaces with windows twenty feet high, decorated with his own art, somewhere below Canal Street.
I’d lost touch with Gabriel and his sister, Hetty, when we moved to Ireland when I was 12. I remembered he was attractive though. As a kid, he would rampage through Hetty’s room when we were getting changed. He’d come out to the pool and horse around with us in the deep end, pulling me under and pushing me off the side, then falling in on top of me.
Even when I was eleven, it was kind of sexy.
There was something about him. He was the one who told me later how much he identified with spiders, spinning their webs. He said it was an artist thing. I wouldn’t understand.
He was in the same grade as Luke (remember Luke?). Boy, was eighth grade full of cute guys. I wanted them all, didn’t even know what I wanted, just wanted to rub my face on them. But where Luke was knowable—popular, friendly, cool—Gabriel was unknowable. A dark self-regard and cleverness: he was clever, in the same, awkward way I was.
Luke was on another planet, the light-filled planet of cool people who knew how to joke around and talk to other people. Gabriel was dark, sarcastic and weird, like me.
So, like I said, we lost touch for years. It only happened again because of Facebook. Let me explain.
Have you ever read Slaughterhouse-Five? If you haven’t, let me suggest you put this down and go do so right now, as a much better use of your time.
Not for the plot (although this would be worth it too) but for the way Vonnegut tells a story: non-chronologically and dreamlike.
“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist…. It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever… we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.”
Dreams are flashes to different times in a life. They could be flashbacks, or flash forwards.
If you’re seeing it in a dream, that’s because it has happened or it will happen.
And sometimes, you dream it and make it so.
What I’m trying to say is this: sometimes I have crazy sex-dreams about people I’ve never met. Maybe people I only know tangentially or by association. Isn’t that wild? I wake up and wonder why. Is it a lost memory? A throwback to a forgotten life?
Or is it a harbinger of things (forgive me) to come?
Which came first: the sex or the sex-dream?
Sometime in the summer of 2008, shortly after the car crash, I had a vivid sex-dream about Gabriel. It was weird because I hadn’t seen him since we were kids, hadn’t thought about him in years.
My first thought on waking was, huh, that was hot. I wonder what he’s up to now.
Well, reader, you’ve guessed where this is going. Thanks to newly ubiquitous Facebook, in summer 2008 it was a matter of a click or two. As if by magic, suddenly we were messaging. It was a matter of moments to find him, “friend” him and, no intense leap of imagination later, to fuck him.
Wow, long time, good to hear from you, what are you up to.
I’m living in California now but going to be passing through NYC for about 48 hours in a few days, off the Amtrak from Sanfran.
Drink?
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➡️ NEXT
Already know Gabriels a baddie coz he calls San Francisco Sanfran. Love these Jill!
Happy Belated Birthday, Jill! Someone told me they had a dream about me recently... that wasn't you, right? 🤪