[click image]...
I am not allowed to come to your house. So I went to my mother's house and was surprised you were there. Even though it was not my mother's real house, it was her house alright and it had a not unpleasant newness about it that I nonetheless didn't like. I'm not sure what was going on, but I am sure that I was alarmingly not feeling needful to see you particularly. You were not of no moment but not momentous in any visceral sense. I think I might have been cleaning a desk or writing a book and stalling about it with a vaguely tea-ceremony-like movement, but not put on like they do at the Charlatan Hotel. I was what people would call "serene" pretty much throughout, with a couple wild exceptions.
I had put on a three-hour Michael Tsarion interview/lecture before going for my nap, wondering if I'd sleep through it, hoping I'd just sleep through the night, but knowing I wasn't going to. I knew I was lying down to dream.
You were in bed, lost in pillows, and I could only see the back of your head and felt fine that you were sleeping. At some point I noticed you up and going for the bathroom. You gave just the faintest notice of my presence and continued. I continued. I turned on the tape player to one of your lectures. Then I got flat on an extremely comfortable bed near where the desk had been. I guess it was in one of the moments when an interviewer interjected something in the Tsarion lecture that I rose from my dream bed to see who it was.
There were three men in the, mercifully not my mother's anymore, living room. One of them looked like David Icke. It seemed odd, but then not, but I went in to look more closely and it wasn't him. The other two were older and indistinct. There may have been a sort of hostess air to my moments in that room, but we did not speak. It had stopped being Mom's house, but it wasn't ever definite whose house it was. I thought it was yours. I thought it was mine. I thought it was simply a house where we were supposed to be. There were quite more people now, but I was going back to bed.
I thought I was going back to the bed I'd just left, but at some point realized it was a bed rather closer to yours. It seemed fine. I was sleeping and awake and listening to the sound of the voice lecturing, answering, and I guess people were arriving for that, thinking it was you, but you were back in your ocean of pillows and it kept being your lecture and I'd swim up from that bed into mine here for half a heartbeat, trying to correct this error. Maybe it wasn't an error. Maybe Tsarion's voice had turned to yours. I always wanted to know what you thought of him, or not even that... maybe just to make sure you knew about him... his take on ancient Ireland....
Then a nice woman came near my bed near yours and began rolling up in a blanket to sleep on the floor. Having realized this bed was not the one I'd started with by the desk and the tape machine, I decided to vacate, give her this bed and go back to the one I'd been in. She wouldn't hear of it and went away. I walked out to the most magnificent room with huge leaded glass windows. I pressed my nose to a pane and looked out to find we were far into the country and there was a light fog to the night that highlighted the green beautifully. The silence was bigger than love. The silence made me so nostalgic and weak with longing for it. It hurt like hell.
Now I wanted to be in the bed near yours. Now, somehow, I needed it and needed to protect you. Sleeping awake and the voice going. People lined up against the wall listening. I thought the sweet woman came back near, but she gave an insistent tug and I saw it was not her. I asked this one, a rough blond, what I could do for her, but hatefulness just waffled off her and she would not answer. I asked again. She went back to the wall with the others. I followed, still asking. She was just hate and mute. I grabbed her, asked her, mute, I hit her in the face and then lost interest at all and went back to the bed.
A couple of times during the dream I slipped back to the streets of Fairfax and a young man for just a moment, but all the rest of it was in this morphing house. At some point, The hate-filled blonde stood about ten feet away, now sharply defined and staring, glaring, hard at me. It made no difference. She went away. I was just in bed with the voice continuing and blinking into my bed here a few times. Each time it hurt me too much, disappointed me, and then I'd be back in the bed near yours, except it had turned into a couch made up with sheets and blankets. It was still so comfortable, but now I began to feel I was really in the wrong place. That the couch had been made up for somebody else. So I got up and straightened it all up, making it look neat and inviting, and went back to the bed near the desk, still hearing the voice as clearly as ever.
I was sleeping on my side, there and here, and someone got in bed behind me. I didn't know who it was, but we were in there like spoons and I soon decided it could be a male because, well, you know, there was something sort of pressing back there that seems awfully familiar. It was okay. I kept sleeping awake with the voice going and there were lots of covers intervening.
But then it grabbed me by the wrists and would not let me move. This woke me up... here/there/here. It felt skinny and I almost decided the hands around my wrists were claws, but there was a huge mound of comforter between me and it, and it was not giving way to my struggle. Then I really was awake here with Tsarion's voice and the mound of comforter, unable to move much, just barely tug down on the mound of covers with the locks on my wrists, weakly tugging to get it down enough to see my attacker. I'd just gotten it down enough to see the top of the head. White hair. Then bright owl eyes flashed at me and I was free and it disappeared.
I wasn't really afraid. I was alarmed and going to fight, in no doubt about winning, but starting toward fear when I had so much trouble moving. I still knew I was going to get free, and so when I arose from my nap I was not upset. I just worried if that had constituted sneaking into your house uninvited. After some thought, I don't think so. You were there when it was still Mom's house.
.
