The Substance Of A Dream

I'm in love with Miranda July. Don't tell my girlfriend, she may not understand. But it's okay to fall in love with a famous person. People do it all the time. You can love them in secret, and it's okay. Because you'll never meet them, your love has the quality of fiction. And you know it's not even them you love. It's some beautiful projection, corresponding more to your own conscious and subconscious wishes than to who they really are. Maybe something in them, or about them, unlocks a door inside you. But the door is you, and everything behind the door is you.

Some people never meet, even when they do. They stand outside each other's doors, knocking. Barely hearing the voices inside. Their destinies entwine, but their souls won't mix. They share bodily fluids like they're sharing emails. Then, I suppose, some people can share emails like they're exchanging bits of soul. Slipping letters through the slots in each other's doors. Sometimes fanmail is like that. You can put so much of your soul into a letter and never know if it was read. Maybe it went straight from the mail into the trash with your soul sealed up inside of it. Scrambling around inside, struggling for air.

Some people, maybe most, live their whole lives that way. Souls sealed up in bodies, scrambling around. Nobody cracks open their chests to pull them out. They write letters to lovers they'll never meet. Lovers who don't exist anywhere but in their dreams. Seal them up and drop them down some dark slot, through a door without a key, into the depths. But those letters always pop back up, the address wrong, and stamped "return to sender".

Some people have entire rooms inside of them, full of unsent letters, because they get the address wrong. Because dreams don't have residences. Dreams wander. They sleep on sidewalks and in random backyards until someone calls the cops and they have to scram. Dreams aren't welcome anywhere. If you met one, you wouldn't recognize it. You'd make something up. Say, There must be some mistake. And shut the door in it's face.

But you can lay in bed, or in the bathtub, with a book. You can read it slowly, and hold it carefully like an ancient letter, dropped from a dream. Tell yourself it was written to you, for you. Because you'd understand it. You'd never dog-ear the pages, or leave it on the radiator to burn and turn brown.

Outside, you could hear the birds announcing morning. They wouldn't break the spell. Only now there would be birds inside the book, and you inside the book. No difference.

And you could even put the book down, close the cover, and still be reading it. Making breakfast like a protagonist would. You had become beloved, a character in the author's mind. Or in a larger mind, which you both shared. Maybe you always had been, but hadn't known yourself. Now there was symmetry. The world made sense, and you made sense, because everything was art. Nothing was excessive. Nothing without form.

This is how you wanted to start your day and every day.

There was never any need to meet the author, or to send letters full of soul. This love was not something you could prove or disprove by dragging it down to earth. Heaven was heaven still. Just because a dream dies upon waking, doesn't mean it never lived. How foolish we can be, in our eagerness to awaken. Is an angel unreal, because she is cloaked in feeling, not in flesh? Is heaven not heaven, when it comes crashing down to earth, unable to support the weight of sins? But purified souls can dance on tippy-toes, and the clouds easily sustain them.

Why do we take such sordid pleasure in squeezing dreams until they pop, like children crushing frogs in their fists? Why do we demand that faith withstand the rash assaults of reason? We don't test crystals with hammers. Yet we test confidence with insults. The spirit which can be broken, we say, never had integrity.

Love is sometimes torn out by the roots, and leaves the heart gaping like broken soil. And someone says, It was never love. It never grew. As if a heart were made of stone, and love could grow from this.

I am learning to carry love, and faith, and dreams, as gently as a bowl of water. To fill my soul to the brim with these, and never spill a drop. The trick is to walk slowly. Being present. Going nowhere.