Of Forests & Clocks & Dreams (A Literary & Art Collection)

Oldies

"In My Life" is playing and I tell her it sounds like it's coming from a can, fading in and out, one of those cinematic scenes set in the 60s of yellowed sepia and greenish tones, long flat metal-shelled cars like exoskeletons, floral blouses and bell-bottom pants, and as the camera pans by, there is the sound of music coming from a radio somewhere. She usually hums in my ear but this time she's quiet and I can only hear her breathing. She breathes and I listen. Her breathing and some static and in the distance, dogs bark. I long to reach for her hand and hold her. The music fades for a moment and then creeps back. For some reason, I see tracks in my mind, clack clack clacking, and a long journey in the back of a freight train and outside the city is withdrawing into flattened imprints on the horizon, the fields open up in front of my vision and the potato farms, a whole lot of them, such that it hurts my eyes to look. I feel disembodied and drifting over them but then she hums now and anchors me to herself. She seems to be smiling and warm like a bedside light. Mine is still on and the ceiling and the sheets are toasted and soaked with golden soup. She doesn't need lights over there. We are a memory fragment encapsulated in time, and right now, we continue on in isolation from the rest of the world, listening to old songs, reminiscing about past memories we had never truly shared, the lifetimes ago we might have met, the futures we already see, at the crossroads of past and present and future, I say. She says nothing. We are soul and consciousness and part of the same essence, I say. We listen in silence. The night air is rather warm and there is no need for blankets which are pushed to the side. I can almost smell her hair and her clothes. She smells like eucalyptus and minty pines. And then, yes, it's a reunion, she says, even without touching you, I feel at home. I feel at home, home, home. John Lennon is singing "there is no one compares with you and these memories lose their meaning" and she continues, I want potatoes. I turn over on one side and stare at her, as if I could stare into her soul. Potatoes, potatoes, I repeat. I tell her to make Shepherd's Pie. She asks what it is. You'll know what it is when you make it, it's something beautiful, listening to old songs, I say, like walking up a mountain and making your stake in the middle of nowhere staring up at the empty forgotten star-sketched skies. And she says, there you will find me. I will find you, I say, even if you're a thousand miles away. I'll be able to tell because the cosmos is swirling and whirling and singing around you and it knows you. I know you. I resonate with you. She smiles. The dogs bark.