You’re Innocent When You Dream

I was lying in bed during the small hours, thinking about how a co-worker had told me that memories are stored in the same part of your brain as where dreams are created. So, if you ever can’t sleep, you should meander back into your memories and before you know it, you’ll be in downtown sleeps-ville.

I wanted to go back to sleep. So I pictured the house I grew up in. After my sister and I moved out, my parents sold that log home they’d built with their bare hands, and the new owners flattened it. A life metaphor. You can’t go home again. 

In my mind I saw the front sidewalk, cracked and home to many ants. I walked up the steps, built of railroad ties. Mom’s flower garden was to the left, peony heads hung heavy as melons and the bees hummed in the sun. Grasshoppers in the mint patch. A sandstone wall near the patio. Up onto the porch, where the wood swing was strung. I never sat on that porch swing, I only ever slouched with bare dirty feet on the top porch step in a patch of sun — which is where our fat tomcat Nutmeg also liked to sit. The cats and I always hung around the same places, a bunch of wild animals who nevertheless wanted a little warmth.

I passed the porch and moved into the house. There was the kitchen table and the old iron woodstove. On winter afternoons after school I’d to crawl into the space behind the stove where it was warm and where, again, the cats reposed. There I’d sit eating dry Cheerios from a mug. 

Floating through memories, I moved down the long hallway into the back room I’d shared with my sister. The floorboards were cracked pine and in those cracks lived a million black earwhigs. Once the light was turned off, they’d emerge and reign fearlessly over the nighttime realms of the bedroom floor. We used to tiptoe to the bathroom terrified of brushing a pinchered bug with our pinky toe. But that was back when I had a robust bladder that didn't call me to the porcelain every single night at 3 a.m. 

Which is how I found myself lying awake in bed the other night, trying to find sleep again after having got up to pee — remembering a person and place and a time that no longer exists. And you can’t trust your memories I’m told.