Dream Journal
I was lying on top of B on our couch kissing. All of a sudden I was lying on top of his sister. She pulled me closer and kissed me at the base of my neck near my clavicle. I turned to my left and saw Melissa sitting at our computer watching us. I wanted her to leave us some privacy, but didn’t want to move to a more private location. I turned back and reached down to grab my partner’s butt with my left hand, and she turned back into B.
I was driving a truck and B was in the passenger seat. I was speeding home at night, going 75mph, and passed a cop parked on the right hand side of the road. The police car was dark and did not move when I passed it, but I knew I was busted. B and I switched seats, and I asked him if he minded taking the blame for my speeding. He smiled and said, “Of course not.” We both knew that his luck with speeding was better than mine.
He drove the truck the rest of the way home—which, incidentally, was my parents’ house—and I asked him if we were allowed to keep driving. “Sure,” he said. “I motioned to the cop that I wanted to drive the truck home, and he motioned that he would let me park it.”
We got out of the truck and the police car drove into the driveway. The officer walked with B and I into the house. The two of them went into the large upstairs bathroom and closed the door to talk. I went into the kitchen where I prepared food with my cousin Misti for the evening meal. B and the police officer had been in the bathroom for a very long time, and I had started to wonder what they were discussing.
Then I was standing on a dusty dirt road toward the back of a small crowd of people wearing white robes: it reminded me of a movie portraying Biblical times. Some officials brought out a prisoner with tied hands and brought him before a balance scale with two cups on each side.
They poured a white milky liquid into the cup on the right side of the scale, sending it down lower than the left side. A friend of the prisoner stepped up and filled the left cup with gold coins until it was lower than the white water. The friend had bought the prisoner’s freedom.
Then they brought B out with his hands tied. He looked dirty, tired, and beaten. The officials again poured the same white milky substance into the right cup of the balance, only this time they poured more liquid and made the cup lower. A large man with a lot of dark, curly hair on his head and chin stepped forward and put many $100 bills into the left cup.
He didn’t know that the officials were going to decide by weight. When the balance scale hardly moved, he lowered his head in shame and stepped back into the crowd. The officials declared the length of B’s sentence: 23 years.
My heart sank and I went into shock. I tried to get towards the front of the crowd to make eye contact with him and let him know that I loved him, but I was unable to move. B tossed something to a girl in front of the crowd. She turned towards me and tossed it to me.
I wondered how I would pay rent with B in a foreign prison for 23 years. I wondered how I would survive without him. I wondered if I would still have the house by the time he was free. I wondered if there was anything I could do to change his sentence. I wondered all of this as I slowly made my way through the airport to my flight.
I looked to my left and saw B next to me in an orange robe walking the same direction I was. While still looking forward, he stepped closer to me and squeezed my hand. He then stepped away and into a side room.
Themes: B
B was at home with a bad back and the apartment roof collapsed. The landlords were in the process of fixing the broken roof when I couldn’t find B. I looked in the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room, everywhere. I was very concerned that he didn’t tell me he was gone.
A little boy stayed at my apartment that afternoon. He was 6 years old and named Riley. While playing with him, I noticed there was a message on the answering machine. I played it and heard a message from the union hall about a union meeting that afternoon. I wondered why B didn’t tell me.
My mother and father came in the door all dressed up as though for church. I was in tears and very upset. I asked them where they went for so long, and they told me that they went to the meeting. They both looked and acted distracted. I asked why they didn’t take me—I would have enjoyed it. I asked where B was, and they said he was coming soon.
B walked in the door with Danny Stroud, and I was angry. I asked him where he was, why he didn’t take me, and didn’t he think that I might have liked to go with them? He tried to convince me that I didn’t want to go, but I really did. I felt abandoned. I knew he didn’t want me with him, and that no one understood why I was hurt.
I put on some music for the little boy to go to bed, and the song that played had his name in it. It was the one tape that he would fall asleep to. I pulled his friend, named Thomas, up onto the bed as well, and told him that I needed to find a song with his name in it.
Themes: B, Left Behind
I was with my mother in Denver at her mother’s house; Grandma had died and we went to Denver to help sort everything out. I wandered through the house and noticed that it wasn’t like I had remembered it. It was very clean with bright wallpaper and full of light.
The living room was gone: the entry to it had been walled-over. I asked my mom where the room went, and she told me that nothing had ever been there.
We went into the kitchen. The refrigerator was very large with two doors side by side. I opened the freezer and found that the entire inside of the freezer was one large block of ice, as though it had been filled with water and then frozen. There were buckets of cubed ice in the refrigerator side.
I was then outside by a very long and skinny lake. The lake was probably only 100 yards wide, yet I could not see its end. I was very excited to see the water but wished that it were the ocean. There were a lot of people lined up in lawn chairs on both sides of the lake. The ground surrounding the lake was orange-ish brown, and looked like a desert.
It was my first day at a new school and they were having student council elections. I wandered through the bleachers in the gym and saw Rachael Degrafenreid—a face I recognized. I sat with her and told her that I voted for someone I didn’t even know. She told me that she did the same. We laughed at the absurdity of that.