The Inevitable Sea

On running away, finding refuge and impossible dreams. A story about stumbling into the future at the end of the world.

I want to speak calmly, rationally. 

But the truth is the future is closing in on us, in ways that we never wanted, in ways that we refused to see. And it’s not pretty. It’s not pretty at all. It’s terrifying actually. And the inevitability of it, or at least certain aspects of it, are hard to acknowledge. And so the shock. And so the rage. Instead of the shame for what we have wrought. 

Prelude to a Dream

Three years ago, I had this intense feeling, not of wanting to run away exactly, but of wanting to drop out. To disappear. To not do all the things anymore. Or any of the things, really. I had a vision of falling in love, with a man with a dog. A man who was handy, who could build things, do things, create things. 

In the dream, I would live with him and put my internet router in a box under the bed and only plug it in for special occasions. In the dream, I would gently recede into the no man’s land of an analog life, where I knew my neighbors and I had a partner of sorts, without having to be anyone’s wife. 

The dream created a nice little crack in my psyche, a crack so fine, and so smooth, I could slip into it for a little while and breathe again, air so fresh I could think clearly. Air so fresh I could remember other dreams, other times. 

One dream in particular: about this feeling I had had in some of my most critical moments, that the present reality I was slipping into was one that had been there all along, and that my experience of it was less like a creation and more like a remembering. A burning off of a fog. A waking up into something that had always been there, and I could step into it, if I had the courage to do nothing more than let it happen to me. One breath at a time. 

This kind of receptivity is thrilling when the fog reveals something that you want, that you love, that you’ve been waiting for. Less thrilling if it’s more like a nightmare you wish to avoid. 

But at this time, at this place, the dream served as a portal into another possibility, one that didn’t feel like a memory, but more like a passageway into another timeline where other kinds of memories awaited, if I could make the leap. 

An Island, A Portal, A Remembering

I want to go somewhere faraway, I told MaryBeth. Somewhere I don’t have to say anything. Somewhere I can lay down and really get still. Really listen. 

You should go here, she said, pointing to a speck of a place on a virtual map. I had never heard of this place. You’ll like it, she said. It’ll feel familiar to you. So, I clicked and another world opened. 

At first, I was terrified. This little island was an unknown paradise, but there had been fires. Fires so terrible the people from the villages had to wait it out on boats to escape. Fires so terrible, the elites had opened their gates to give the people passage, even as their lands too were burning. 

I’d wake up in the night from the dream of the dream, worried about my imaginary reality in this oh so real place, panicked, until one morning I wasn’t and I decided to jump, the thought of the man and the dog and the box and the bed not yet fully formed but soon to be. 

On the island, the actual island, I tried to remember what I used to think about in the before times, in the timeline before this one. I tried to remember veins of thought I had followed like gold in the cracks. I tried to recall what had been calling me, before I had gotten caught up with so much of the other kind of listening, it had gotten hard to hear any other time or space, any other voice at all.

Dreams Deferred, Futures Realized

With pen to paper, I wrote sentences. Sentence upon sentence, until the man messaged, the one I would dream about in the future. The one with the dog, the one with the house. And I read him my sentences. And it was as if he had dreamed them, too, and for a little while we dreamed along the same veins, remembering the same past, and the sentences about remembering ran on and on, until they flowed like a river. A river I could float away on, like Joni Mitchell, a river that led me to a shore that said: here you shall remain. 

And so I stayed there, after I left the island. After the man with the dog and the box and the bed, said he had a wife actually, a real one, not the sort of absent one we had supposed in the dream, but the kind that needed him, even if they weren’t together-together after she left. The kind that he had hoped for in his own dream, the one he dreamed before the goldenrod, the dining room table, the phone calls and me. 

It was a heartbreak, the heaving in the bed, stare at the wall kind, but not horrible, not too horrible, because it had made a crack, and the crack had gotten so big, I had slipped through it like a door, and I started to understand how dreaming, with all of its illusions and sleight of hand had a kind of wisdom to it, a kind of sacred trickery, a kind of weird and wondrous know how, when it came to moving me around, when it came to making sure I got where I needed to go in this lifetime. 

What Remains

And while the man was gone, the island remained. And there was no fire, just the purifying nature of panic, and the pages, the stacks and stacks of pages which amounted to a guidebook of sorts, or more like a pile of interrelated by not fully comprehensible notes, but necessary and needed. Like trust and the willpower to pull them out of the pile–like a card, like tarot. Instructions, really, that dissolved into reality but that still managed to orient you on the very reliable map of your fractured, crack rich, vein heavy heart. 

All of which landed me in the future. Not as a place, but as a way of thinking, of being, of surviving. Of listening, of knowing. Of noticing. Of becoming who I might need to be, if I ever got caught on an island, in a fire, nowhere to run but the endless sea after all.