I woke up with a feeling of hesitancy today. On time, though. In just a few minutes it will be the time when I was born, the perfect time to wake up every day according to my former chiropractor (I can’t decide if I want to call my new chiropractor, or if I should try a new new one).
If I wake up, it means that I’ll have to get ready for work. I don’t want to go, despite the money. I wonder why the universe is handing me so much money. Why do I always feel anxious? I feel like everything good that happens is preparing me for something bad – but surprisingly never the other way. And so no matter how much good comes, I always wonder if it will be enough to face down what’s coming.
Will it be enough? I counted my money last night, some of it. It keeps coming in. I have to straighten out my investments.
I had dreams last night. As always, or as per usual, I don’t remember how it started.
I was in an elevator, crowded with a bunch of people. I don’t recognize them – men and women, of course one of the men was quite attractive, with olive skin and less than dark brown hair. That specific Mediterranean (I typod so bad the autocorrect suggested both subterranean and neurotransmitter) look, I love it. I don’t remember who the other people were, but there were about 4 or 5 of them. More than should be in an elevator.
I decided that I had to get to the water. We were in trouble, some kind of existential trouble, not really running from anything, but our lives were somehow in jeopardy in the grander sense.
I had to get to the ocean, the others didn’t want to go, it was dangerous. I didn’t know why. I don’t think I had been before.
I was dragging a cart, the kind of cart that I’ve seen people bring to festivals, the stock Coleman camping cart. It’s wheels sank despairingly into the sand, but I dragged it anyway. It was full of bottles, I believe full of booze, which I wished was water as I trekked over the sand. Up dunes, down dunes. Huge dunes. The others fell behind, and I pressed on, knowing that I would get tired and they would catch up. Huge dunes.
Why did I always choose to go over the dunes instead of around?
One was so high, it looked like a ski jump, and I couldn’t see to the top until I got there – and realized that it was a sand cliff on the other side. Impossibly high.
For some reason I decided to jump off rather than turn around – the others would catch up. It was obviously a stupid move. I took the cart with me, and the bottles fell out. Did they break?
I remember the feeling of falling, and seeing the sand below rise up to meet me. Then, suddenly, I was in the dirt – I don’t remember pain – and the Mediterranean man was beside me, picking up the bottles and placing them back in the cart for me. The others had caught up, and we continued. I looked back at the dune – impossibly high. Why had I jumped?
Continuing on, we saw the ocean, impossibly far. I don’t know how to explain it. The sand was dry, we kept going toward it. Was tide coming in or going out?
The waves were impossibly high. 20, 30 feet easily. 45-60 more likely. Every wave a tsunami. So long between waves as it would have been, if every wave were a tsunami (I love how accurately the brain can still preserve natural law in dreams, at least in mine. The sand grew steeper, and we could see the ocean bed as the water pulled back, impossibly far, gathering the water necessary to crash all the way up the shore, to where we were.
The waves came with incredible force. One crashed right in front of us, hitting us with a forceful spray of saltwater and sand, painfully stinging. Suddenly everything was water. Then, it pulled back.
I had wanted to come to the beach. The others said it was dangerous. It was. I wanted to get closer – the water pulled back to a cove, if we could just get back past the waves, we could get there, we needed water – but the others said that it was too dangerous. A second wave came in, and suddenly I was slapped so hard and everything was water, I was floating. We fought our way to the sand, barely making it out of being dragged for miles down the horizon where another giant wave was forming.
It hit me – tide was coming in. And I looked back at the impossibly high sand dune behind me, impossibly high… and realized that the waves had formed that sharp cliff. At the last tide. And the water went back there, easily a quarter mile or more away. And from the size of these waves, it was doing it rather quickly.
We had to run.
These were my thoughts as I looked down the steep sandy embankment towards the gathering waves… We were doomed, If not with the next wave, then the one after that. Or the one after that. Or we could run back, to where there was no water and we were doomed anyway.
A terror so deep that it feels like peace. I could feel my heartbeat slow, giving up.
It’s my inclination to spend the rest of this post musing about the physics involved in this dream rather than any real issue in my life. What kind of dystopian nightmare world was this? With tides that are easily a day apart, or at least long enough to let the sand dry completely between them, or was it the sun that was that much hotter? Was the earth spinning faster to produce such big waves, or were the underwater mountains that usually trip up the water before it comes at us totally leveled and gone? Was this another, much larger, planet? I don’t remember the sky, other than blue. When was this, where was this?
The man that I’m supposed to see tonight, I have known him for 15 years. I have hated him the entire time… I take it back. I don’t hate him. I do hate fucking him. I do like the fact that he keeps seeing me after all this time, I wonder how he feels about me… being as he basically has watched me grow up, which is kind of creepy.
He tells me that I look like his college girlfriend. I wonder if my college boyfriend lecherously found a younger version of me, so that he could watch her grow up and wistfully imagine what it would have been like if he hadn’t cut me lose and fucked up his life afterward (I don’t know that he fucked up, but he definitely fucked up by cutting me loose), seeing her every month and imagining 20 years of marriage in between.
He’s so painfully boring… at least to me.
I wonder if there’s a parallel between this slow acquiescence to my fate for the evening, and the dread of discovering that the entire world is ruined and one way or the other, we’re all going to die under these hostile waves while the ocean just does nothing but what it’s compelled to do by physics.
God, I hate capitalism.
It occurs to me, on the last few sips of my second cup, that if the water level on the ocean rose enough that the underwater mountain ranges were deep enough under water that they would no longer break the momentum of the water as the waves rolled onto the continental shelves, and the waves could actually get that big.
I hate this song, why did I not skip it.
I mean there’s safe guards against that in most places, but what the fuck is New York going to look like? Central America would disappear completely… As would much of Southeast Asia, although the volcanic activity might actually save it.
I remember looking at old maps of what the world looked like before the continental divide described, my curiosity sparked by reference to it in Land Before Time. Then my step grandfather showing me what the world would have looked like before the axis reorientation, and why the Nile flows against what is only just now gravity, and my fascination with Egypt began.
A terror so deep that it feels like peace… what a concept. I love it when I just plainly write a statement like that, only to discover it later. I feel good about myself in these moments, perhaps there’s something beautiful in my head after all.
The boy hasn’t gotten into my pocket yet… I push of adrenaline inside my throat, but it’s true.
Almost.