...
Gerald, who's French, and gorgeous—zherald—who couldn't speak English much when he was my boyfriend, but speaks it now pretty well, with a thick accent, was pointing to a ladder standing next to an industrial building about a hundred yards off and telling me he'd help me but I had to get the ladder. This wasn't as good as him doing it, but seemed reasonable, so I went after the ladder.
When I got there, it was an old woman who was Billy's ex-wife, only this wasn't her, and she was with a girlfriend, and we were at her house in Sea Drift. They were about to use the ladder to bring down some cobwebs. Her friend was bummed I was coming to get the ladder. For a flash there was a question in my mind about what they were doing with this ladder, but I was all, sorry, but gotta do what I gotta do, like it was my place to take the ladder from them, my duty. Billy's ex-who-wasn't was fine with it. She just lifted her broom and began, saying hale farewells as I went off with it.
Then Billy was coming down the road, which somehow, despite being Sea Drift was sort of twisty and hilly. I was alarmed. There was a woman going to pop out of a house and so near his ex-who-wasn't... it could be a scene. The woman popped out of the house.
Right out there in the road. She was in her bra and panties because she hadn't wanted to let him get past her house while she finished dressing. She had a perfect body, but one foot was not a foot. It was this huge, knobbed, swollen, bloody glob of deformed flesh, which was completely grotesque. It didn't seem to faze her that she was thus exposed. I was standing there thinking that's some clubfoot. That's not even a clubfoot! That's a footclub... that's horrible.
This was going to take some time. I swung my body over the bannister to be able to lean on it while I waited for this scene to play out. My weight just barely let me over it. The bannister was loose. Too much weight was trying to pull me off it and down into the stairwell. I was trying to do a reverse on the move I just made to get back on the safe side of the bannister. My leg wouldn't go over. It kept hitting about an inch from the necessary clearance. The bannister was getting wobblier and I was starting to fear trying anymore.
A very handsome fellow, no one I know, came and stood on the stair behind me so as to break my fall if the bannister broke. He didn't touch me. He didn't grab me and pluck me from my peril, though he was young enough and strong enough to manage it. But he quite affably came to make sure I didn't fall down the stairwell.
Don't ask me how a stairwell got in the middle of the road in a snitzy beach community that was suddenly undulate, but there it was, and there I was, just getting a bit of relief from my fear of falling, and I woke up to a very bright and sunny day. Truly. Sunglasses indoors bright.
...
I don't like this dream. I don't like it at all. It is not me. It is a threat. It threatens my independence. It is a peek into a me who would just slide back down into the wheel of karma, a me who wants to retire from difficulty, who would let herself slip into the agonies of the social compact [if it's still even out there in any recognizable form] and stop all this wandering. Trade this path for a treadmill. Quit the field. Fuck my vow. Fuck bodhisattvas. Just sink into the easy agony of working my butt off for a selfish life of ease.
Everyone I know identifies with that. I could go back to engaging in our friendships in all the ways that please them. I could come off helpless because of this, this or this... with sometimes that... be my normally luny self. I could have Gerald if I'd let him be jealous without having to be ashamed of himself. I could have Billy if I'd get naked with him.
I'm going to go off now after more coffee and consider that my precarious position on the other side of the bannister from all that might actually be the good part of the dream, that it's a good thing my leg won't go back over it onto solidity again. Bunch of old and/or deformed people on that side anyway....
.
