Memory

A pair of deerskin shoes in my left hand and a leash on my right, I close my eyes and walk.  Black sand wraps around each step, the sting of saltwater hangs heavy in the humid ocean breeze.  The dog pants, pressing forward, lost in the moment.  Just whispers of what was, drowned out by the cacophany of life and its barrage of time and place.

I had a dream last night.  The crooked spines of elderly oaks corkscrewing and bending in an early spring thunderstorm.  It is dark, and I’m carrying a sheaf of papers in my hands.  I don’t know why, but I throw them up into the screaming wind.  And then I scramble after them.  I leap up and snatch at them as they whip about in the rain.  I look at them, at what I wrote, and it’s a bluish black, bleeding mess in a language I used to know.  I’m sure I did.  But the wind snatches the pages from my hand, and a black sand beach, a white dog, foreign ocean air–they rise up on the indifferent currents into the obscurity of the storm.

And I woke up lost.