Fourteen Steps to Nowhere

Entry Eight

Last night I had a dream that felt like a reality.  It could well be a reality someday.

Like so many other days, I spent it arguing with my mother.  We were going somewhere and it got so unbearable that as we got onto the freeway and we were starting to gain speed from an off-ramp that I opened the door and jumped out regardless of my own safety.  My mother didn't try to stop me, slow down or say a word as I jumped out.  Oncoming traffic slowed and swerved to avoid me as I ran up the freeway embankment to climb over the fence.  I ran out into an endless green rice paddy.  I remember the beauty of the vibrant green against the gray sky and the gray water and its impressive silence.  I remember the egrets standing in water on one leg, quietly searcing for a meal.

After I made my way through the field, I went to the airport without a possession to my name, bought a ticket out of the country and left.  I don't remember arriving in Ireland, but I moved to Ireland.  I lived in the countryside and had no neighbors nearby.  The only people I ever saw were the most determined tourists who wanted to see the rugged coast of northwestern Ireland.

My mother never spoke to me again.  She does this.  When she gets angry at someone she holds a grudge.  She hasn't spoken to her former best friend for four years because her best friend said she helped my mother do a painting (which she did) and from this my mother assumed that her best friend was trying usurp her identity and thus stopped all contact with her.  She didn't speak to my grandfather and even refused to be in the same state as him for more than ten years.  Anyway, I can see her never speaking to me again.

I never saw my brother again.  We're not close, but I'd miss him.  I never saw my friends again.  I spoke to any of them again.  I imagine they thought of me fleetingly as I eventually did them.  How is so-and-so?  I wonder s/he is doing with hir life?  I just stared out into roiling sea and let my memories flutter out over the waves over the newfound life in the Old World.

I saw my dad.  He came to visit me and we explored the tourist trails and the castles together.  He was the only one who found me worthy to hunt out and see once again.

It was a dream becoming a reality and something beautiful and something horrible at the same time.  It was sacrifice and it was avarice.  It was heaven and it was hell.  It was my dream.

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