More Dead and Dry Flowers for Me

More Dead and Dry Flowers for Me
by @aladreth
6-26-12


"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late." - Ralph Waldo Emerson






You tell me you love my mind.  You tell me you will do anything for me.  You say you know that might involve quite an act because you know how my mind works.  I smile.  I do think you know me.

Last night I dreamed.

I dreamed all of our memories were kept in bright plastic eggs.  They floated light and beautiful in the air. None were distinguished as good or bad.  There were no dark and scary memories.  No!  They were all pastel or bright.  Like Spring and Easter over and over again.  It was quite a sight.  All those lovely floating plastic eggs.

You were there.  With your 'withered' hand, as you call it.  You spread homemade lotion from sunflowers on my skin with both of your hands.  It mattered not if your hand was numb or if you could feel with this hand.  I could feel.  I knew you were there.  I knew you were on me. I knew your hands were on me.

This is not translated from another language, my boy.  This is the way it was.

I am thin and light when you are around.  You will not read of perfection.  You bring perfection to the ordinary or mundane.  My wrinkles smooth out from your special touch.  Stretch marks disappear.

I am soft and pliable with you.  Your fingertips dig deep in to my skin.  We are our own porn movie.  All worries dissipate.

There was an angel in my dream.  Her name was, "Brittany."  Not, "Gabriel" who appeared to so many prophets throughout  time.  No she was "Brittany," and she was overweight and I did not trust her.  It wasn't because of the size of her hips, it was because the size of my doubt.  My faith is strong, I like to think, but when you are face to face with belief or cynicism, you will take the easy way out.

She offered me two choices.  I could step out of this basketball size courtroom, out into the night or I could step down off a blue carpeted incline - straight in to the unknown.  There was no indication of how it would be.  I could not see in advance.

At least the outside night air was breezy.  I could see great lit parlours in the distance.  I could hear carnival games and roller coasters going up, up, up and then crashing down.  People were laughing and mingling.  Perhaps not all were happy but I knew what was going on outside the open door.  Life, it seemed was going on.  Just.  Life.

I would chose the easy way out.  Brittany followed me out the door. By the way, I hope you are not thinking of the famous singer by this name when I am writing this.  I should describe to you that she had dark hair and she was in her 40's, I would say, if angels had ages.  

She grabbed hold of me after I captured the horrors that awaited me in the previously presumed wonderful night.  She flew.  I could not.  She had to drag me with her.  It was all too much for me.  I asked her pitifully, "Please slide me gently down the side of the brick wall.  Give me a place to rest my back."

She was kind enough.

Harsh, too,  "You took the easy way and it brought you to this.  The easy way is not always the better way."  She asked me if I wanted to try that stepping off the blue carpet incline thing in the basketball court.  I have tasted too many tears, I thought.  What if it is worse?  Worse than this night air.  Worse than the dust in the air.  Worse than these horrors I see.

There were flowers.  The flowers were special, because even dry and dead, they had powers to transport the people lost and confused in the wind to places they wanted to go - away from here - just away.  Some wanted to go to Alaska.  Some wanted to go to Hawaii.

I wanted to go the place where you were.  I didn't care where you were.  I suppose I will be picky someday.  We know I can be.

I love Halloween.  It is my favourite holiday.  There were booths of Halloween performers, actors - people who were dolls.  Dolls who were people.  It was creepy.  All the people I used to know who are now dead and gone were there and dolls were chasing them.  There were pictures of my mother in breast pasties and grey striped bikini bottom.  Her pasties were silver stars.  She was a star.  One of my Aunts was trying to dress her.

I had many pictures and plastic eggs and Christmas ornaments and I had to find the right one.  My mother didn't look too bad, by the way.  So, this was in her better days.  This picture.  She argued with me there about the picture.  There wouldn't be a picture such as that because she did not do such things.  Pasties?  To be sure.

Every time I would pass from one area in the booth to the another, zombie style creatures would grab me.  I supposed this was only make believe.  It was not real.  It was somewhat fun.  Chase me, zombie, chase me.  I would play the game.

There was a porch too.  A porch on a house I wanted to get into.  I assumed you would be in the house.  I wanted you to be in the house.  I needed you.  I told you before I need you more than you need me.  "I doubt it," you said in the sweetest, most innocent voice I had ever heard.  You were in the fetal position when you said it.  You were cold in 55 degree temperature.  Your bones were aching.  My old man.  You may be 'old,' but, boy, can you still fuck.

Your voice coos like the dove I watched for hours yesterday. Well, in between reading about two serial killers.  View dove, read a bit more about dismembered bodies.  View dove, read about a bag of something brushing against the leg of an innocent bystander.  View dove, read about black sooty snowflakes falling from the top of burning rooms.

View dove.  

In my dream, eventually everyone began to figure out the magical powers of the flowers and everyone began to take them.  I collected my own bunch of flowers.  Some dry, some half alive.  My guide, "Brittany," advised me to put them in an old jam jar of water right at the front door.

"Even the dead ones?"

"Yes," She was getting frustrated with me, I could tell.

Yes, everything would return.  Everything would come back. I was giving up if I didn't believe that.  Wasn't I ready to go?  Wasn't I ready to take those flowers and transport myself to someplace different?

The people surrounded the porch.  Some of the people were the half zombie types I referenced earlier.  Well, what was acting, what was real?  I wanted this dream to continue so I could find out.  My fortune cookie yesterday had said that the person I was with was faking it.  It made me laugh.  I knew there was no possible way.

Zombies.  Everyone is writing about them nowadays.  Well, I tried to lie and tell the people slash zombies the flowers meant nothing.

I told them I had been to the great and vast beyond and it was fucking scary out there and they didn't want to take any of the flowers to transport them out there.  Ah!  What horrors awaited them if they used the flowers.

They were skeptical at first.  But, it was true.  I had been out there.  They seemed to open up to the idea I might know what the hell I was talking about.  Many left the flowers for me.

More for me.  Yes, more ways to get out of this place.  More dead and dry flowers for me.