I saw you in the dream again last night! I saw you stand up and fly away. You had turned into an orange bird and you flew too close to the sun. And I saw you disappear.
I woke up and realized you look like me, talk like me and smiled like me and i felt you–you even felt like me. But you were not me.
I keep hearing the same old song again and again and again. It reminds me of pastel colored hills which I saw when I was a child. And now the child is all grown up and even the dreams are not pastel anymore. They are set in orange overtones. And the song is sung in a foreign language and I do not know what it means–but it is on repeat. Like death–it is on repeat.
There is a broken pencil on my table and I keep looking at it because I cannot remember why I put it there since it is not mine. And it sits there, forlorn. I know I will never use it because if I do—I don’t know what will happen. I think whatever I write, it will come to life. So it sits there–not moving, broken and forlorn.
I eat sugar–I have been eating sugar for three weeks but I do not know why. It crunches like gravel between my teeth and the white glass–I engulf. I think there is a plum tree growing inside me but that has nothing to do with the sugar. It has nothing to do with me as well–because the tree has green leaves and I sometimes can feel them tickling my innards. Soon I will be able to pluck the plums and make jam.
The opaque lantern is lit and there is light. And I can see. You are still there–looking away, your face towards the wall. For a decade you have been sitting with your face towards the wall. And for a decade I have been having the same dream. And for a decade I have been making plum jam. Now there is so much of it that it drips from the walls–which are made of plum jam.
As the macabre desert tries to engulf our house again–I reach out to you but stop myself because it is suddenly so still around me that I sit down and listen to the wind outside and decode what it tries to say to me. It has a message for me–I know who it is from…It is from the bearded goat which lives across the ocean. They will slaughter him tomorrow and he sends his regards. I will send some plum jam to his family.
The moths are back and they dance around the lantern. How silly–there is no music anymore and they still dance–on repeat. Till the get close enough to it and burn to ash.
And just like that—the match between day and night ends. I go to sleep and I know the dream will come again. Maybe it is all the sugar I have been eating. There will be no day or night for another ten years and then I will wake up–and sit with you, facing the wall–and eat plum jam.
