Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Home movies
In dreams lately she’s back from the dead, no worse for wear, sometimes young and able-bodied . . . sometimes not. Last night she was young and able-bodied. I told her she was beautiful and I loved her. She said, “What do you love about me?” and true to form — I mean, it felt like the sort of banter we’d do in our courtship — I said, “I love your intellectual traits and your physical traits.” The sort of humor that Big Bang Theory cashes in on these days, but back then it would’ve felt fresh. She play-kicked me. We were watching a home video she’d shot as a child and there was something about it that made me cry. I think it wasn’t the video so much as the thought of her as a child, not knowing what her life would be, nothing but potential and hope. She saw me cry and apologized. Something like, “Oh, shit, I didn’t realize you’d be able to see me in the reflection” — and then I noticed it, too: young Karen with a camcorder (yeah, I know, anachronism), at most ten years old, reflected in the glass door of some storefront.
Later we were in an airport without enough time to make our connection. Must have been Vegas because I left her behind and ran through a vacant casino, my clothes peeling magically away the further I ran and I knew soon I’d be naked, running; thinking, oh how trite this is for a dream.
D.
