Last night, I left my body for awhile, just like I always do, though it took longer than usual. My heart was very restless beforehand, as I had eaten late, and drunk some wine, and stared at a small screen restlessly, listening to and feeling the tympani of my heart flip-flopping along irregularly. It distracted me from the serious seduction of sleep, and caused me to be anxious and worried about my death.
But eventually, the quiescent charms of the nodding world grabbed me resolutely, despite the protests of my bones and the worries of my mind. Once finally within its grasp, it held me fast, and erased the rampant thoughts with an endless void of black and nothing, though some dreams would follow in the spaces between the empty expansive regions of my settled soul.
I have no name there. At least, I am never called by one, the one that I have known, and by which I have been known by others for nearly seven decades. It is, upon reflection, as though all the people who choose to embrace my ethereal acquaintance are speaking indirectly, much as they might to a proxy, and an approximate, if not proximal version of myself. They are very serious voices, full of dark import and implacable intent. They are dubious friends in a forlorn landscape.
Upon reflection, I am unable to recall even a single instance of shouting, or even of voices raised in consternation, though I may find myself weeping, or frightened, or reluctant to place my frozen feet upon the morning floor, once my normal senses have returned. If the voices are soft and weak, how are they able to upset and influence me so?
Perhaps it is the fault of genetic encoding, hard and fast within the matrix of my grey matter, the firmware of my corporeal existence. It causes me to wonder if the character and substance of dreaming is manifest in similar simulacrums in all people, or if it has been constructed exclusively and uniquely for me. There are no functional digital recorders, or video devices, or photographic equipment that may be carried to immortalize the netherworld’s wispy images and faint vocalizations, though the transient evidence of their substance may be found in the black jittering traces of EEG styli scratching their unsettled way across a narrow ribbon of paper.
I wonder and muse about a great many things during my waking hours, sometimes fretting about the seemingly inconsequential, and skirting blissfully around and unaware of weightier issues. This may be the purpose of my dreams; the mental sorting of the wheat from the chaff, the relative consequence of which will color my first waking moments with their emotional residue.
The inescapable stamp of my choices, canceled and validated with the indelible mark of my own approbation or condemnation. As there can be little doubt that this is evidence of my judgmental conscience, I should rest more easily armed with the knowledge that I have one, and that I shall not be plagued by the blank unempathic vacuum of the sociopath.
And so it was this morning I awoke to a vivid memory of my childhood doggie, our family’s first, and simultaneously penultimate pet, Bailey. She was a wee thing, some random mix of Cocker and something else, with long, black hair, embroidered upon a brown muzzle and matching paws. She lived close to the ground, as did I in my youngest years, where people’s legs were as well known to us as those found upon tables and chairs.
We didn’t mind bumping into them, as people were softer objects to our probing and leading heads, than were legs of the wooden variety. There was also an apparently endless supply of tasty and intriguing droppings upon the carpets and the floors, and we both enjoyed sampling the strange formless bits of discarded living, cast carelessly and conveniently about us nearly everywhere we looked or smelled, or placed our hands and paws.
The provenance of her name is no longer clear to me, though I recall some Northern Michigan, occasional summertime cabin neighbors whose surname was Bailey. Then again, this may be my dim memory’s bid to reclaim the light of truth through the facility of handy fantasy.
But Bailey was real, and sang in her own misbegotten, howling way to the sound of my bagpipe whenever I tortured her with it. The rest of the family would laugh and cajole the poor canine during her unintentional, visceral outbursts, and about which I always suffered much guilt, because it seemed to me that she was in pain. Oddly enough, she never left the basement where I accomplished the bulk of my practicing; nor, come to think of it, any room wherein I plied my fledgling piping talents. This constitutes additional evidence of the inescapable imperatives of genetics, both canine and human. Perhaps she liked it.
She was my buddy, a boy and his dog, united by similar worldly curiosities, and vexing adult mysteries; destined to endure and to explore them all, one by one, no matter how long it might take. We had time, which seemed without end to our infantile awarenesses, wherein minutes stretched to hours, and hours to days. Nothing would end, and we would bear witness to it all.
Ah, but verity gives way to insight, and speculation yields to revelation. Boys grow up, and dogs grow old, and the world is never again as we first imagined it, or as we played and slept within it. What is the structure of our lives, where memories form the solid residue, and the future mimics our youth?
Our future, as solid as dreams, and our youth as evanescent as memories. I wonder where Bailey is now, and if her soul has migrated to a better destiny, though the unbothered, oblivious nature of her canine self seemed unfettered by future concerns.
We both dreamt, in our own, inimitable ways. I watched her many times, her paws frantic during a chase, yelping quietly through her slack muzzle, in another world we both shared, in a time that cannot now be altered, but will never again be reached.
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