Dreams of Home

He pinned me down like a beetle on a board, face full of concern. “Why won’t you talk to me? I’m worried.”

Little lightning bolts shot around just under the surface of my skin and I tried to think of what expression would be appropriate on my face in this moment. “Why does it matter? Why are you pressing this?”

He took my hand and I didn’t flinch, not really. “Because I love you and I’m worried about you.”

Because I love you. The weight of it settled onto me like a hand on the back of my neck. “Okay,” I sighed. “I don’t know where to start.”

“What do you dream about?”

My breath felt a bit like a laugh, “Home, I guess. 226 Martin Valley Crescent.” The words fell off my lips like pebbles dropped from some terrible height and I know they won’t find the bottom for a long time. My brother told me once that if you dropped a penny from the top of the Calgary Tower and it hit someone, they would die. I wondered what would happen if someone dropped me from the tower. I closed my eyes and saw the red brick gates and someone had pried the ‘V’ off again and so we were living in Martin Alley and honestly that was more truthful. My mother hated the alley. She planted poppies against the back fence by the garbage cans and was furious when the neighbour kids picked them.

“By the roots!” She raged.

I dream of being in the kitchen, kneeling in front of the pots and pans cupboard. The cupboard is in disarray, as it always was. Too many things in too small a space. That was a bit like our house in general. There was a rule though, that every once in a while, one of us poor unfortunates would be called upon to organize the cupboard and the expectation was that we would miraculously find a way to hold together the cascade of dishware with only the help of gravity and cleverness. Sometimes we did well, and the cupboard stayed in order for an entire day. Sometimes the system broke down halfway through cooking the next meal. You could always tell, the clattering avalanche behind the cupboard door, the sound in your chest like a physical blow. Down, again. Failed, again. The mess was endless. In my dream I kneel in front of the cupboard, bones creaking like a prayer and my slim wrists sore and tired from the weight of the pans I can’t stop reorganizing.

There is someone else there, just past the corner of my eye and they stand over me as a stack of saucepans falls with a crash. I can’t get up while he’s there, I can’t stop. This is my task. And as I watch the pots begin to multiply, shaking and clattering into a mountain that spills out of the cupboard doors onto the linoleum and I worry that I’ll have dented the floor the way that Dad did when he was too tired to cook and grabbed the handle of the frying pan, forgetting he’d put it in the oven just a few minutes before. Down, down, down, it fell with the sort of crash that follows you in the hammering in your temples for much longer than it reasonably should. The crash of his voice just an echo behind and I’m not sure if he’s cursing me, or the world, or the night shift. Dad could afford to dent the linoleum, what could anyone possibly say about it? But I know I can’t and as the metallic roar grows and the river of metal that once was shiny but now is burnt and bronzed with use tumbles, I feel myself denting instead. In offering. I might heal, but the floor won’t.

And someone (my dad? My brother? God?) stands behind me, right behind me, his breath in my ear and he screams in harmony with the heavy, clashing steel.

I don’t know why tears of frustration burn like acid. A rawness in every swallow as though screams and words have knives in their hands and they battle to escape.   

Finally, I stood to face him, and he smiled, opening his arms to me. “Now, that’s better right? Good work.”