Dream Journal
I was in my mid-twenties and in Homer. Sitting on a stool next to me was a female midget. She had wrapped her arms around herself and looked quite traumatized and withdrawn. She had been on my father’s fishing boat earlier that day, and I wondered what had happened to her.
I left Homer, and when I returned I was still in my mid-twenties, but everyone and everything else had aged five years. I had been gone for five years but I hadn’t aged. The female midget was now a mother and had a lesbian midget partner who asked me if I knew a particular midget in Fairbanks. She was described as always wearing flannel shirts with the sleeves cut off. I did not know this particular lesbian midget, but I thought that her description could have applied to all of the lesbians and the midgets in Fairbanks.
I entered into a different room and found Melissa sitting on the dining room table. She was beautiful, taller, and older than me since I had not aged while I had been gone. I ran up to her, crying, and threw my arms around her. I told her that I had missed her terribly. Crying, she said that she had missed me as well.
I noticed that Melissa was wearing a red, white, and blue striped shirt. A friend of hers walked in from another room also wearing red, white, and blue stripes. I knew that these matching costumes had important symbolism. Looking down, I saw that I, too, wore red and blue stripes separated by thin white stripes.
I turned to the midget and told her that her baby is my dad’s. She looked shocked, but knew that I was right. She left to confront and acknowledge her past.
I was then sitting in the middle seat of a minivan that was driving towards Homer from far out East End Road. My father-in-law sat in the passenger’s seat. He was very skinny, perhaps too skinny, and divorced from my mother-in-law. So much had changed in the five years I had been gone, yet I had not changed at all. I wondered if I could still call him ‘Dad.’