The Isolation Journals - Day 38

My Friday trips to the grocery store take extra time now.  As if time is in short supply.  Why should I care?  The store is across the street, and I'm not proud of this but I drive so I can buy enough to last the week - it's more than I can carry unassisted.  But I learned the hard way that driving your car exactly once a week for .2 miles will kill your battery.  So I take the scenic route, coming and going. 

We have another deep dive into our subconscious minds to make you feel some type of way heading into the weekend.  This prompt comes from Hédi Jaouad, professor of French and Francophone studies, and father of this project's founder, Suleika.

Prompt:  Transcribe a recent dream, as it came to you—that is “raw,” without any processing, embellishing or rationalizing. You can use words, images or any other mode of expression. The point is to emulate the creative flow of the subconscious. In sum: Bring down the barrier between sleeping and waking. Unlock the untapped potential of your unconscious…and free-surf on the waves of your dreams!

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Dreams and the weather.  Both can be wild, both can be fascinating.  As a topic of casual conversation, though, each one can be crushingly banal.  Unless the experience was particularly powerful or remarkable.  Following the Nashville tornado, weather was all anyone could talk about.  Now, as the barrier between our sleeping and waking lives is shimmering and tenuous, dreams fling open the cage for our conscious minds and bodies to wander.  

A trip into our subconscious - leave your suitcase behind, but buckle up, there's turbulence ahead!

Sometimes it's the dream about the timeline, more like a recurring image I've had since I was a kid.  Like a Tom and Jerry cartoon where the hallway keeps repeating in a seemingly endless loop.  Spring into summer always marked by a neon azalea bush, sun-flooded and buzzing with honeybees.  

Now the colors are muted, the bees drift lazily, drunk.  The timeline appears stretched and smudged, a bit disordered as if transferred onto Silly Putty and stretched out like a Sunday Peanuts comic strip.

Other nights it's just ache and terror.  Andy has left me, found someone more tolerable.  Just beyond my reach, I'm forced to maintain a "friendship" and thus a front row seat to what I used to have, and now, inexplicably, don't.  

I wake up and he's still there beside me, my back cracking and neck creaking as I strain to check, to be sure he's still there as we are frozen in time but still growing older together.