28 Apr 2024
Dream
I was in my childhood backyard the swing set had the swings too low to use. A neighbor asked about them I couldn’t describe what happened. Then I turn around there is a picnic table. Lauren my sister, Gaby and Priti my friend were at the table, Lauren kept taking pictures of me with a big camera that looked like a Nikon but was a Polaroid. I was telling the group how I felt trapped and survived an attempt at taking my own life, I had graduated college and been a teacher, I had to move back in with my parents who thought I was incompetent and so they signed me up for 3rd grade as a 30 year old. I kept trying to tell everyone in the class, the teacher, the principal that my knowledge was beyond that of 8 years old but no one believed me. I kept on pausing the story when my mom came back to give the picnic table food and went back to the kitchen, my sister Lauren went to take pictures of my mother in the kitchen to document the moment and of her cutting food in the kitchen. They had strawberries at the table, we didn’t know what to do with the tops and threw them on the grass in front of us, my dad popped his head over from over the fence where he was cutting the hedges that grew too tall in the neighbors yard. He said he would bring them to the compost later. Gaby said she drank her own urine and everyone thought she was joking so we laughed, but she was serious so we said you shouldn’t drink your own pee. Eventually I kept trying to tell my story about being put in the third grade when I was 30 and no one was listening still, my sister looked at me like I was talking nonsense, Lauren took a Polaroid of me in that moment, she signed a note it was a quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ 100 years of solitude, I didn’t quite know what it meant because I didn’t understand the Spanish.
