Dear Camilla,

9: Each Dream is the Same

Dearest Camilla,

When I drifted to sleep on Oliver's boat, I saw a figure skater dressed for competition. She skated towards me and pulled her back leg above her head as she launched into a hypnotizing spin, head tilted back, eyes on the ceiling. Then, above me, a dark Fuschia and a glowing blue streaked the sky, flakes of gold fell like snowflakes as a clear resin rose from the floor, binding everything together, frozen in time. I moved freely through the material, though, and I could jump vertically up and down as I chose. But I got tired and rested my head on a rose petal that appeared on my command. I couldn't tell if it was cold or warm there, like how hot water feels icy or how hypothermia makes you want to rip your clothes off. There was moss on the floor of my daydream, and I was naked and barefoot, savage. I was so much like a wild beast that chains materialized around my ankles. I was trapped in a menagerie, observed like a pet, stuck inside a painting. I suppose that even in my greatest moments of introspection I still bleed self-restraint.

My eyes still sting when they are closed, now, but I become lucid in the dark, the bright pain awakens me. I have climbed the tallest mountain and am ravaged by the journey, but I can finally see far and wide— the white snow caps and treacherous caverns. I am choking, but I see, now, the glowing pink of my eyelids in the sun and I know complete calm; I understand the nature of stillness. If my experience is shaped by interactions moving like ripples emanating out from around the pinpoint precipice, the focal point of my mind, then I hover above its bull's eye like a water spider, watching, waiting to run at any disturbance marked by the fish underneath me. But, here I am a tunnel that knows light on either end— before birth and after death— and only darkness for all of its life, its fundamental structure; anonymous cars zooming in and out, their passengers holding their breath. A chill on my lower back and shoulders is the only constant, and, for a moment, it's as pure as solitude. But, the cry of a summers' eve's crickets calls to me through the breeze of my childhood. A chirping frog, a mooing cow, and a buzzing gnat above a rotten peach are all a reminiscent reflection of what, for me, once was but is now only dying, tumbling down from the mountain peak, seeing nothing now, underwater where the fishes roam.

With a shaky breath that rocks my body like a sob, I open my eyes in illusion, and the burning stops.

I know, Camilla. I know. So, please believe me and let me tell you.

I am so afraid of you leaving me forever, now that I am here because that is what you did to your father when he was in jail. You care deeply about justice. The driver who killed your mom was dead before he could suffer any real consequences. But, you know I would never murder anyone. You do know that, don't you?

Everything is so confusing and I feel beyond fragile. The silence between you and I is deafening, all I can hear is my heart breaking. The fissures inside started slowly, but now cascade down around me like an avalanche in a thunderous, angry charge, shattering like a mirror, ripping like the canvas of a prized, ancient painting. But in this catastrophic earth-altering nothingness, I come to understand life in a new light.

"Last night I had a dream within a dream. I dreamed that I was calmly watching actors working on a stage. And through a door that was not locked men came in with machine guns and killed all the actors. I began to cry: I didn't want them to be dead. So the actors got up off the ground and said: we aren't dead in real life, just as actors, the massacre was part of the show. Then I dreamed such a good dream: I dreamed this: in life we are actors in an absurd play written by an absurd God. We are all participants in this theater: in truth we never shall die when death happens. We only die as actors. Could that be eternity?"

— Clarice Lispector

Forever and infinitely yours,

Maxine.