21. dream dispatch
A few weeks ago I came across an incredible poem on Twitter that I have tried and failed multiple times to find again. I remember almost nothing about it, but almost everyday since I have remembered how it made me feel. There’s that Faulkner line, “Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar,” that comes to mind each year. It understands the full weight, temperature, of August, how the air can feel so thin but hang so heavy, how within it we are pulled toward and tugged backward at once. Anyway, the poem, or one line of it specifically, was like the fall equivalent of that sentence. Like the later-part-of-late August, practically early September, equivalent. I had found a language for what the season has felt like, and then I lost it. This means nothing to you unfortunately, but if I ever come across it again, I will share it here, as I meant to do when I first encountered and somehow forgot to bookmark it.
Google tells me 52 minutes ago marked the beginning of fall. I have been incredibly content this September, which is much more than I can say about the weeks and months prior. My brain is quieter, but my body is busier. This year I felt weirdly attached to summer for the first time, hesitant to let it go — not sad, but not eager, either. But then September came and immediately everything started feeling much more right. I am keeping myself active — physically, professionally and personally — the kind of movement that feeds a low, stirring hum of happiness and just the right amount of distraction. I feel like I’m progressing toward something, like I go to bed each day actually having lived it.
A part of me resists verbalizing all this, given that I’ve only recently started finally growing out of all the angsty, reductive attachments I have to specific seasons, years, dates and ages. I’m trying to stop “taking the weather so personally,” and yet here I am, feeling more at ease than I have in a long time and attributing it to the planets (rip Virgo season!!) It’s definitely a chicken or an egg thing. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it doesn’t matter, so long as it makes for good poetry. If a poem can help my body understand what August, or September, is, then maybe the months do have emotions.
J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
On Sunday I woke up from a series of unbelievably vivid and ridiculous dreams. The first is one where I learn, only a few days before the wedding, that my brother is going to be married. I receive the news from my mom, who also nonchalantly informs me that the fiancé is a member of TWICE — later to be revealed as Jihyo, which is not significant plot-wise, but startling simply because I have no idea how my subconscious self conjured up an actual k-pop idol that my conscious self knows nothing about. I had to google her afterward just to make sure that name’s even real. Anyway, they have only been dating for a month or two. In the rest of the dream, I meet both the bride and her friends and partake in wedding preparations, and I hate how hard I’m trying to be socially pleasurable to someone I barely know. I realize this is something I would have done and hated about myself in real life, too, and it’s always these little accuracies that are so subtly but disorientingly jolting. Watching the rehearsal from the sidelines, I wonder how my brother’s ex-girlfriend (in real life, his current girlfriend) would be coping with this news. I remember thinking of her with empathy, how devastated and heartbroken she must be, especially given the fact that — for some reason, in this dream — she and Jihyo look uncomfortably alike. I think about how cruel it is for people to have types, to move on but not really, and it makes me very sad.
The next involves an escapade with two characters, practically manifestations of Succession’s Kendall and Roman Roy. I forget all the details, except that we are family friends and the three of us are driving down PCH to get to some party before catching a film at a theater. I guess I am in love with the older brother — which makes sense because Kendall Roy quite literally looks like the middle-aged, drugged-up version of the white boy I had a giant crush on in middle school — and I am willing to bend over backwards for them while they completely ignore I exist. A series of bloody, action movie drama ensues, during which the Roy brothers disappear and I start panicking, wondering where they are and when we’ll get to the movie, until they eventually come back to tell me, without a care in the world, that they’re sorry, they won’t be able to make it, something has come up. This dream also, at least in that moment, makes me very sad.
When I wake up I simply laugh about the utter outrageousness of it all, and I’d take these any day over the realer nightmares I’ve written about before. But for the briefest second, a sweet spot right before the details fade out, the distress is entirely unironic. There must be something about growing up feeling ugly, or undesirable, or not white, that leaves a permanent sour taste in the back of your mouth, and you don’t realize it until Jeremy Strong bails on you in your dreams or your brother marries a TWICE member you’re convinced he doesn’t even love.
Sometimes it feels like all I write about are poems and dreams, but I presume it’s because I feel them happen to me in very similar ways, vessels for memories I didn’t even know I had or that might not have even been born yet: “I believe poetry happens to a poet long before they ever write it.” Maybe I’ll turn all these dreams into absurdist poems one day. Poems about dreams, two things that don’t have to make any sense or that you don’t even have to remember, to make absolute, perfect sense.
All this to say, fall is treating me well. A year ago today, I flew into Midway to mark my move to Madison, and on Sunday I am shedding this apartment for a new one. How can I not take the weather personally when it’s practically begging for it — little, incessant markers of memory? Next fall I will likely remember this week, when I noticed a tangible difference as the sun set before 7 for the first time and decided to sit, eat, work outside, without wifi, well past dark to pretend it wasn’t real. That is exactly what the poem was about, I think. Again, if I ever find it, I’ll let you know.