RIAH'S PLAYGROUND
I’d like to be a rainchaser. Like a stormchaser, but easier to please. All I need is falling water. I would follow the unbucketing of the sky, drive 20 miles over the speed limit to catch up with it, anything to save myself from getting stuck in the perplexing, puddled After. My skin would never be barren, never without the pricking invitation to panic-primitive pleasure. My eyes never without the coy squirming closed against the rain’s slick slide tackle. I would dance a lot and make no money. That, or I could move to Seattle.
I think it’d be just dandy to live on a commune. I don’t have a great grasp of how a commune works, exactly. But I have a distant acquaintance that’s lived on one, a couple podcasts that have mentioned them, three friends that regularly expound the merits of the idea, and 7 people that can always be counted on to remind me that humans are, at base, just pack animals. I figure all those folks together must be onto something. There would be parts I didn’t like, of course. People who are both annoying and inescapable; a pernicious combination. Side eye stares from my compatriots after I start munching on a honeycrisp apple and peanut butter when we’re trying to reach consensus. Toil. But I would like the churning of the butter in the morning with the sun, which I imagine communes to do a great deal of. Though maybe that’s the Amish. I would like the linkage with the land, and the interwoven lives, and the soundtrack, which I listen for as a repeating loop of Brandi Carlisle’s “You and Me on the Rock.” Paused, of course, for cricket song at dusk.
Imagine me as a mathematician. In a book I read, the author tried to convince me that prime numbers hold the key to the secrets of the universe. The author succeeded. Now I’d like to don a degree and mingle with the magic. The extra decade of schooling would be an inconvenience. But I’m more worried about learning to live with twin deprivations; facts that don’t have flings with fantasy, and stuffy little rooms. I like to think, though, if I knew the matter of math like a child knows the mold of playdoh played with for hours on end, if the flame of fascination ever really caught - I would burn bright.
I could be the person who escapes civilization, in a way that’s both a romanticized farce and a diaphragm-deep demand. The opposite of civilization and car horns is untamed trees and watercolor time. Watercolor time is a concept I came up with and then felt very clever about. Especially after my mom breathed it back to me and said “that’s very clever.” Let me explain my idea so you can think I’m clever too. Sharpie time is fixed. We make boxes and color them in. We do not let the colors run. Sharpie time should be sounding like capitalism. Watercolor time is for people who would fail Economics 101. It’s for the angels and the agnostics, for people who blur the lines between Knowing and naivete. Watercolor time is when you talk for three hours around a single table, a forgotten crumb of scrambled egg forlorn on the center of your plate. And the hours fold into each other like wet ingredients falling into dry, a snake-headed, sloshing slide.
It will be a pity if I end this life without at least a brief sojourn as a baseball mascot. I would be the best in my field, of course. I would practice moonwalking in costume at 2 am in the bathroom mirror. I would be known small-town-wide for my autographing abilities. But I do anticipate one problem. It’s those little kids they trot out there to race the mascots. Sometimes the kiddos don’t even have the decency to work for their win. I imagine a 6 year old swaggering onto the pitch, cocky and complacent, rocking two dutch braids and some light-up Buzz Lightyear shoes. Just because she watched me get toasted by the 267 kids that came before her, she would think she, too, had the race in the bag. I don’t think I’d be able to stomach the loss.
I dream of being the kind of person who can go up to another in a crowded room and say “Hey. Do you want to go on a date with me?” It is always the prospect of my warm, warm, red face that stops me. If I ever got there, I think I’d break down laughing. Not out of nerves, just the sheer absurdity of my own power. And they’d say yes or no, and it would matter which, but not that much. I would have wooed myself.
I want to know Spanish. To know it. To love and learn with it, to think in it. Not the clunky, disjointed processing of a 2008 computer. I want the raw material of relationships that surpass the rudimentary. I want to dream and doubt and wander in a world of words that once I did not know.
Last night, in the dead center of the night, I rolled over with the evaporating mist of a smile still on my face, because I had the best dream. I was there, living my life, and it was all the same, except I had good posture.
The deepest dream in my body is to be a swimmer. I don’t mean professionally, in a pool. I mean a person who swims. In freshwater, for brain-bending amounts of time. To do it, or to say they’ve done it, or perhaps to raise money for pitiful looking puppies. I am confident this would bring me cell-celebrating serenity. I have never once looked up the practical possibilities for enacting such a paradise. For one, there is the matter of companionship. How do you make friends as an expat of life on land? This question alone is enough to deter me from the lead-limbed task of typing a single search into google.
One day, I will be a person who shops at the Mast General Store. This is a dream I only have when I’m inside the Mast General Store. Once every couple years, I am overwhelmed with conviction that few things are so important as acquiring such egregious amounts of extraneous income that I can sling 70 dollar dresses over the scanner at whim. There is usually a single sweater which first incites these riveting reflections. I try to act casual as I feast my eyes on the organic wool, checking it out like a horny highschooler sneaking glances at their crush from across the crumb-laden cafeteria. Sometimes, even a full ten minutes after exiting a mast general store, the dream of one day making a purchase inside it persists.
It has long been a dream of mine to become a zipline guide. This, you should know, has happened. But why not meddle with the mundanity of a dream made manifest? June’s aroma is a secret passage back to the first days in my fairybook fantasy of a nine to five. The scent - a buoyant boast of fresh-bloomed flowers, sailing by just to snag your attention and steal away again - brings back the beginning. When I walked through the woods and saw myself from afar, as a phantom or an idol, wielding the power to guide. Now I lead tours everyday, and I rarely feel like a Goddess. I feel sweaty. But remember the fresh wonderment of a girl who gave up glory to glide through the air?
Picture this. I write a book about North Carolina politics, immediately bring sense to the whole state, and change politics forevermore into a place of love-centered logic. This isn’t a dream I own anymore, but if I can mention a dream realized I can mention a dream remembered. Imagine a little me sitting in my family circle with my sauce-stained napkin in my lap. I liked my chair pushed in so far that I couldn’t get up without scooching it back. There, tucked into the table, I listened to lamentations of hate and lies and the leeching away of safety in my own home state. I was probably eating penne pasta with parmesan. And to my miniature mind, my parents were so . . . complacent. Though I wouldn’t have said complacent. I was precocious, not a prodigy. I would have said my parents seemed still. Resigned. Perhaps I would have said wrong. I was still too young to understand real evil, by which I mean gerrymandering. I still thought I wanted the powdered parmesan that came in a little green can and doused every noodle, not the bag of bendy white kindling my parents preferred. Now I like fancy cheese and I, too, am resigned. But it twists me, sometimes, to remember.
Sometimes I dream of getting lyme disease. I wish I could say this was a deluded dream, an unfounded accusation of the ordinary odds. But I’ll be the first to admit I spend a lot of time in the woods. I imagine myself weakened and pitiable, all the other dreams blurring into dark matter that never was. This, of course, is a nightmare. What if Robert Frost never got to choose a road at all?