Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Old Dreams: Dream of August 1st, 2008

I was walking in a park in the bright sunshine.  I felt a breeze on my face.  I remember the grass being very green and lush.  I was in the park to watch an outdoor movie but something was holding it up.  While I was standing there waiting for the movie to begin a man walked up to me and asked me if I wanted to go on an indoor picnic.  I was not attracted to the man but thought that perhaps we could be friends.  He led me into a town and we walked down a hot sidewalk up to a building.  I wondered who would have a picnic in such an ugly building.  Then he got out a huge set of keys, unlocked the door, and pushed me inside at the same time I realized that it was a prison.  I asked for him to let me out and he said no, but instead led me down the hall to a big room.  Once in the room he locked the door behind me.  It was dimly lit with a gray painted cement floor.  The room was covered in filth.  There were bleacher seats four levels high in different spots around the rectangular room.  He led me to a table at one end of the room.  Once there a uniformed man poured stale black coffee into a Styrofoam cup.  He then picked up a piece of stale white bread, slathered it in disgusting mayonnaise, and stuffed it into the cup.  This was the picnic the men were offering me.  They told me to go sit down on a bleacher.  I sat at the end of the first set on the left, two levels up.  I looked around the room and noticed that there were only women held prisoner there.  All of the guards were men and they talked among themselves.  These women in this prison never said a word.  The women had a dead look in their eyes and their skin was gray.  I noticed one woman I know sitting about four feet from me.  She did not recognize me but looked straight ahead.  I would have thought that she was dead if she wasn’t still sitting up holding her own Styrofoam cup of burnt coffee, stale white bread, and mayonnaise.  I realized that I may be locked in there indefinitely so I held my breath and tried to swallow what was in my cup.  When it touched my lips it changed into just warm water instead of the disgusting filth it was before.  I was not yet one of them and realized that I never would be.   I walked up again to the desk and told them I wanted out of here.  They laughed and said they’d let me out when they were ready, maybe 20 or 30 minutes.  These women had all gone to this place by choice and had no desire to leave.  They would live in there forever, rot in there forever.  I wasn’t going to.   That never was what I wanted.  I waited a few more minutes planning my next move.  Then the man who had led me there in the first place unlocked the door and I walked through both it and the door to the outside.  Once outside in the sunshine I could see through the window of a coffeehouse.  Inside the window were two beautiful girls having lunch together.  One was blond and the sun was shining on her hair through the window.  It was done in a 1940’s style and was gorgeous.  She had rolled it, pinned it, and put on bright red lipstick.  She looked over at me.  I tried to walk toward them but instead the man who had finally let me out pinned me against the brick wall I was standing near.  He laughed.  It was a power struggle, nothing more.  I looked up and an overweight bald man with a red face was leering at me, he had huge handcuffs dangling from his belt.  I stopped struggling against the man and once he thought he won I slipped out.  The big man with handcuffs handed me a paper bag with a lunch in it.  I never looked in it, I never wanted it.  I walked down the sidewalk toward the coffeehouse and he never even realized that he wasn’t the winner.

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