Saudade

I’m having that recurring dream again. The one about places I’ve never been and people I convince myself I never knew. We’re back in your hometown. I’ve only ever passed through, but I’ve been here in my sleep dozens of times. We make our way up Midnight Drive and head down Moon as ours hangs partially obscured in the star-speckled summer sky. It’s in my favourite phase; a waning gibbous. I tell you this, and you remark that it’s like me, still beautiful and bright, but fading into darkness ever so…

I have an urge to howl upwards, but everything in me says subdue yourself. You’ve not got much time…

All at once I become lucid… this is a tricky dream. It’s always getting interrupted by alarm clocks and honest realities that this life is not that one. Maybe it’s just that past attunements briefly align, maybe it’s the clairsentience that runs in my female bloodline. Maybe, and more likely, it’s saudade. Either way, I don’t ask myself more questions. I just enjoy the borrowed memory.

You take me to the grounds of your old elementary school. We sit side by side on a creaky swing-set sipping cheap swill from a paper bag reminiscing about our younger selves. You look the same as I remember; still wearing those horn-rimmed glasses and carrying yourself with an air of sadness, and I’m as brazen and wildly unattainable as ever. You lament about all the trees they’ve chopped down since you were here last. We sing Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” at the top of our lungs, pouring one out for all the trees on this planet that have ever met their untimely end. Most people would think such wistfulness lame, but not us. We know we’re connected to all of it. We understand that everything is holy. That every living thing is worth saving. Except maybe whatever it was we were.

We lie side by side on the field and I tell you I want to become a tree when I die. The gibbous continues waning. Without warning, I close my eyes as if I’m going to make good on my promise right then and there… like I could become the tree. But I just wake up instead.