Typewriter Series #270 by Tyler Knott Gregson
The dream started out with me being alone in the street, outside my best friend’s house. It was cool and rainy, but everything seemed really bright and saturated; the leaves on the trees were brilliantly green, and the pavement was shiny from the water. It was really quiet and peaceful, but lonely at the same time.
I remember finding this weird shack and walking into it, hoping to seek some shelter from the rain, and there was a man inside. I don’t remember exactly what he looked like, but he wanted me to “sell my life” to him, meaning, in essence, that I’d die and become a ghost. I guess for some reason there were benefits to this, because I agreed, and suddenly I was looking down at my corpse on the ground, and I was transparent.
From this point I was free to go do as I wished, and so I left the shack, and in the place where I had been standing in the rain earlier, was for some reason, Jadesprite. She approached me, and apparently she was dead too, because we discovered that we had similar powers, we could fly and “become” other creatures, for example, I sort of possessed a random monkey that I found, and was able to swing through trees and such.
After a while of having fun in the cold, rainy street, Jadesprite suddenly got this frightened look on her face and flew away without a word, and I was left alone. Confused, I turned around, and my dad was there. He came up to me and said something along the lines of “You have to come, Nana is falling.” (Don’t know why my mind chose for him to say something strange like that, but hey, it was a dream.) I obviously interpreted this as something bad happening to my nana, so the both of us took off, with him running down the street, and me sort of… run-gliding.
We rounded a corner so fast that a bunch of change fell out of my dad’s pocket, and I bent to pick it up, and it was really frustrating because I knew that it shouldn’t have mattered while my nana was in trouble that there was some change on the ground. I realized this halfway through and left most of it there. As I was running, it felt like the wind was coming up from behind me and pushing me forward, like I was flying. I remember glancing back and seeing the monkey that I’d ‘been’ earlier swinging through the trees alongside me, and suddenly everything hurt in my heart and I don’t know why, and the wind and rain was really cold and I was frightened.
Eventually we came to this random person’s lawn, but I realized that it was the shack’s lawn, the shack I’d been to earlier. Everything slowed down and it was really quiet, and my dad wasn’t there anymore. But then my nana was, she was standing next to the shack, she wasn’t wearing a shirt, and her arms were folded over her breasts like she was cold and in despair.
I went up to her with this pain in my heart, and she said to me in a soft voice, in her kiwi accent, “It is time for me to fold.” (Again, weird dream-speech.) I didn’t know what that meant, so she clarified, “Hannah, I have to go.”
I realized that she meant that she was dying. Without saying anything, I took her hand and I lead her to this strange… nest-like thing that was behind the shack. It was like a laundry-basket, but bigger, and it had blankets and a pillow in it. The trees hung over the tiny back yard like this beautiful green canopy, and everything was still bright and rainy, but I was scared.
We laid down together in the nest, and it was wet with rain, but I held her to me and I just cried, “Nana,” and it was this long, wavering cry that sounded as if it wasn’t me making the sound, but someone else, and I was hearing it from a distance, like it was an echo, and yet I could feel it flowing up from my chest and out through my throat.
And then I tried to say “I love you.” But as I tried, the words got stuck in my throat and my whole body seized up, and I tried again to tell her that I loved her, but it was caught, and I couldn’t breathe, and I held my nana really, really right, but I couldn’t tell her that I loved her. And it was here that I faded from dreaming and reality set in my body, the cold form that I held turned into my pillow, and my eyes opened.
Realizing that it was a dream, I relaxed my throat, which still felt like it had the words caught in it, and I released my hold on the pillow, and I just sobbed.
TLDR; I died, my nana died, and I couldn’t tell her that I loved her.
I feel like the dream’s brought attention to a fear I’ve always had, that people in my life will die and I will never have gotten the chance to let them know how much they meant to me.
He
drifted helplessly
through night.
It seemed
he would never
rise again
through the sea
he wallowed with.
-Tyler Knott Gregson-
It’s here, here in this broken hour that the broken in me sings out to be heard. The fractured and the severed, the sharp edged and the unglueable. Can you hear it from where you rest? Can you make out the sounds over the haunted hum of the Autumn wind? What will you say to me? Scream it or whisper, it matters not, just say it and it will be carried back to me.
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