UNTITLED

Chavonne came to me Sunday night in a dream. I had waited 30 years for another chapter to her story. She came to me just as she would be today, just the right amount of aging, her thin blonde hair a bit stringier; her rounded Pixie face a little thinner. Those flashing blind blue eyes that had been so full of wonder, they were saddened now, as though with too much knowing, too much wisdom.
She came to me as I slept in my hospital bed, a newborn diabetic. She came with her beret, her knitted vest that looked like an Afghan, she came with all that jewelry and those hoop earrings, and those blue jeans with the blown-out knees. She came with a boyfriend, and a Hash Pipe, and with clipboards on the wall. She did not seem as interested in talking to me as I would have liked to imagine. I would have liked to imagine I was her sole purpose in being here tonight, but I was not. 
I thought about her mother.
Her mother.
Her mother, who had explained to me at the Funeral why Chavonne had loved me so much. “Chavonne never had a friend like you Steve, she never had a friend so marvelously unconcerned about her health”
Oh, how I wanted to talk to Chavonne! I wanted to talk to her alone and up-close and way down deep. But as things so often go in Dreams, the setting was all wrong. There were people everywhere; we were in a noisy, out-of-sorts, out-of-doors kind of place. To have an intimate conversation would be impossible.
 Like before, I took Chavonne by the hand, and led her blind diabetic body through the woods, through the brush towards a bonfire where we might dance. “Hurry up, follow me” I urged her like before.
We were not going to the fire to dance, no. I was going to make a place for us to talk. I ran people away from the fire. Sparks from the fire shattered skyward as people flew into the woods. The noisiness subsided, I could hear the gurgle of a stream nearby. The fire began to dim, to soften itself in the nighttime. There were wild geese above us, or Seagulls, or newspapers riding on the wind. Chavonne sat waiting, blindly satisfied to sit by the fire and let its glow, its synesthesia, work its magic.
 But there was one person, a faceless mousy girl that would not leave. She was busy with chores, busy with dressing and her make-up, with sorting junk mail, with counting leaves, and arranging stones. In frustration I told her: “You have to go now! I do not care that your breakfast is on the table, that you have not finished dressing, never mind your bills unpaid past-due, your junk mail, your leaves in need of raking. I have no need for your undone laundry, your dishes in the sink; you may vacuum the forest floor later, this afternoon, and shine your mirrors tomorrow if you must. Just be gone. Be gone right now and leave Chavonne and I alone to talk”.

 It was at this point in my dream I began to resurface. You know, that feeling of rising as you begin to wake where the dream fades but there is still no hint of reality. I usually try to hurry my dream up at this point.
 Of course, I didn’t want the dream to stop. I did not want to go. We never want to leave a dream that seems to have such a poignant promise wrapped around it. As we rise from such dreams, we are convinced the place we are returning to is just a lie, just a lock, just a stage where we play out and pretend to be who we truly are. As I passed from my dream state, I could see Chavonne through the watery ripples with that wistful smile… Her lips moved, and it took a moment to hear the words, frozen as if in time, words so softly spoken.
“Oh, Steve, you haven’t changed a bit.”
 I awoke, and I cried and I cried and I cried. I had waited 30 years for this chapter.

"Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time they thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer." plutarch