“I wish karma was real,” and other things heard in recent dreams.
“I wish karma was real,” she says, on account of somebody else doing something, to which, afterwards, in-response to such-and-so-and-so, returns, “No, really, honestly, don’t you think?”
“That guy is such a whatever,” a guy in a turquoise jacket says, upon opening up a cupboard that has been the home to a single duckling for over the past 24 hours in the dark.
Watching television on a projector screen, the first season of MTV’s Real World, a girl next to me says, trying to hold my hand, “Dude, this is so gay.”
One time, while walking by a supermercado on East 113th in Spanish Harlem, this girl runs past the group we’re in and as she’s passing, yells out, “Chinga tu madre!” (mind you, to/at whom, remains a mystery).
“Hold out your hand,” a young woman says in a striped zoot-suit and pointy-brim hat the same style, and as I do, she proceeds to bundle a rusted iron locket onto my palm before closing my hand into a fist. “Do your best to hold life onto it,” she says, in that dream-logic way, and when I ask her what does it mean, she responds, “Because you need to know everything, alright.”
Sitting near turnstiles at a busy subway entrance while waiting for a friend, a guy and a woman walk up to me, each holding a small dog near their individual shoulders, and proceed to go off about the taste of today’s coffee. The guy says, in a not-so-happy tone, “Shit sucks, I tell you,” while the lady – as if to lay into me – points her finger, jabbing into my shoulder, and elucidates her own perspective with the following (if-confusing) diatribe: “Coffee’s for losers. It’s not how they used to make it. No, no, I understand you like it and all, but it’s really nothing how it used to be back when grandpa made it. Even if it’s stronger or whatever they say it is nowadays, the fact that they no longer use real coffee beans—substituting it with these pods, means the world to me. Says it all right there, plastic flavor, and I don’t know about you, young lady, but I myself don’t like to drink plastic. So, maybe you’d do good laying off it for a while.”
Two of us were running through an unlit, derelict amusement park when the following began to play over the loudspeaker (out of nowhere): “Say, you there. Yeah, you. One with the diamond ring necklace and teeth like Bugs Bunny. Maybe you can do me a favor and try to take a few tips from your sponsor. She really does know what she’s talking about.”
A couple are arguing at a bar with an acquaintance of mine. My acquaintance is sober, the couple is not. Here is how it goes: Woman A, “I don’t like how you are talking to my girlfriend,” then her partner, Woman B, insists, “She’s not telling us we’re alcoholic or whatever. I think she’s trying to say to be careful.” Then, my friend, shrugging, bemoans, “What I’m saying is I don’t drink.” Woman B asks, “But what does that have to do with us?” to which, Woman A raises her voice and quips, “Do I complain to you about watching my fucking sugar?” whereby my friend rolls her eyes and says the following (with condescension), “If the shoe fits,” and the rest I can’t remember.
Waking up in a bathtub, there is a man on fire with pink hair and golden-esque, bronzy skin, and he is standing before the tub at the sink, combing his hair non-chalantly. I of-course ask him if he knows that he’s on fire, and all he says is, “You say tomato, I say toe-mah-toh.”
Similarly to the last image, upon waking up in the middle of a crystalline, stainless steel, eerily reflective and completely still body of water, surrounded by an endless amphitheater of cloud, I am on a boat, a small one (think, like canoe), and there is a façade/amalgamation of who I think is a great-grand-ancestor or something, who chomps on a weathered nub of a cigar, dressed in longshoreman coveralls, a newsboy cap, and randomly has a handle of Gamsol turpentine next to him. His hair is comprised of stringy, curly tufts of delicate white hair protruding in ivy-like fashion from his cap down his head, and his skin hue is that of a sunkissed, Tuscan leather. When he speaks, his accent is primarily that of some Castilian-like, Basque-y intonation, but his English is more or less intelligible. Where are we? He says, in that kind of vaguely snide-yet-at-the-same-time-coquettish sort of way, “The middle of wherever you think.” Okay…so, the next logical question is why are we here, to which he explains, “G-d woke up one day, just like you in this boat, and asked the same question.” I ask if he’s related to me, and he says, “Can say it like that.” Right…care to expound? “I am someone,” he goes, “who was part of you a long time ago, in a different part of the world. I visit to make sure you’re okay.” The last thing I remember, is that somewhere during this conversation at some point, he tells me, “One day, when you are grown and have a family of your own, it is important you learn to cook with oil of the olive.”
An old friend from many years ago in New York sits down with me for a bialy and coffee at this place near NYU. It’s morning, and she says to me, simultaneously chewing with a bite of steam-wisping pastry, that “the way it was” is no longer “the way it’s going to be.” In that dream-logic sort of way, nodding my way through the conversation as if I know what on Earth she’s talking about, she reports, “Like take for you, for example. Here one day, and then gone like a flash the next day. That’s what the meaning of life is all about.” Randomly, I stand up and go to a window aside us that overlooks the street from the 2nd floor, and while pointing to a group of students, I tell her, “One of those people is Sabrina from our meeting.” My friend then, with an umph of gusto to her voice, opens a door that wasn’t there before from the brick, a door which leads to nowhere over the street, and as she’s peering down towards the street, says the following as she looks: “What birds see is different than how we see things."
A dearly departed is playing pool in a smokey billiards lounge, complete with neon signs and the dim lights, music, etc. He lines up a shot as a group of us watch, and with ease both to his voice and technique, issues the following before landing a corner shot: “Pool is cool you guys.”
During a semi-nightmare, while hiding from Michael Myers in a shadowy, electric-less house, a random person I’m hiding with tells me to, “Close your eyes when you’re breathing, or else he will hear you blink.”
Another dearly departed sits with me at Rockaway Beach amid late-winter. It’s clearly morning, from the echoing caws of seagulls to daybreak over Delft blue horizon, etc. She has papery-thin, super pale skin like her entire body has Rynauld’s. Over the crashing waves, as we sit facing the shore, us bundled to sit knees-up and arms-crossed over, she says, “I think that everything is an anything.” We talk for some – remembered as a blur – to which, at some point she next goes on to say a couple of more things: Exhibit A) “Remember when we used to go to that diner off East 23rd? It was the hollandaise.” (?) Then, Exhibit B) “Boo-hoo—that’s what mean people say.”
At a giant, sober beachside commune/getaway party-resort-thing, as I’m given a tour to a part of this Flatiron-like brick building by the water where my hostel-y dorm is, this very spring break looking gal (i.e. sunscreen-nosed, round sunglasses, straw sunhat, pink tank top, denim shorts, sandals) approaches us, and with a flip of her auriferous, from-the-cover-of-Vanity-Fair blonde hair, immediately proclaims to my tour guide, referring to me, “One way or another, this bitch is going to pray.” We start talking, a blur, things I don’t remember, then she says, “Mafalda. My name is Mafalda. Stop saying Mathilda.” Then, in-response when I tell her that I don’t need to live there, Mafalda goes on to say, “Living’s easy. It’s figuring out what that is, that’s what’s hard.”
