Dream Girl
I had a dream last night. I stop the car I was driving at an
intersection when three stray dogs dash across my path. The smallest dog, that
looks like a dachshund or something, however, changes direction and leaps
inside my vehicle. For a confused moment I couldn’t find it in my car and think
that I may have been wrong, but then I spot it sitting on the back platform
behind the rear seats.
I pull the car over and coax the dog out, and then the
dream-thing happens where causality is sort of fluid or squishy, and I start
driving after it or it starts chasing my car down this long, long hill towards
a little park and community center.
And then it turns in to a little girl, with her hair in two
little puffs atop her head the way I’ll sometimes do my own child’s, she looks
vaguely like my own three year old only the skin on her face is puffy, red, and
scaly from being exposed to the elements while living on the streets. The
little girl in my dream keeps calling after me to give her “huggies”, which is
the way my own child will ask me to cuddle her, but I keep running away from this
dream-child, thinking to myself that I already have a little girl I love at
home.
It was while I was evading this little girl that a swarm of
wasps descends on the park we are in, scattering the grown ups and children who
are at play, or sitting on benches reading newspapers. I’ve recently been
dealing with hornets trying to establish nests in the eaves of our home, maybe
that’s where this part of the dream originated. I start swatting the wasps away
and now am running from them. As will happen in a stampede random groups of
people start to run in unplanned tandem with others, which is how I found
myself next to the little girl again, and now I can see more clearly her
chapped, sun-exposed face, the same skin I had seen on the cheeks of street
urchins in Kabul. She is crying, saying that she has an owie, a wasp had stung
her little tongue, and one of the older ladies nearby stops her to look. We
peer inside her small mouth and see that there is indeed a stinger embedded in
the left front corner of her tongue, with a green colored envenomation spreading
from it. One of us pulls the stinger out, and the little girl tells us that she
has to tell her mommy about her owie, but of course, the dream-me realizes that
she is a stray, she has no mommy to tell about her owie, and that’s when
everything falls apart.
One of my favorite photos taken from my child’s birth in the
hospital is one that represents one of my early attempts at parenting. We’d
been told that skin-to-skin contact was best for newborns. My wife was
exhausted and needed a break; our child had been born a tiny thing (our
perinatologist kept referring, to our bemusement, to our developing fetus as a
“dinky kid”), so I tucked her in to my shirt, and there we are in the picture,
both of our eyes closed, her nestled against my chest in my shirt. I can’t
imagine not loving this child as much as I do, her skin against mine.
I hug the little dream-girl to my chest, feeling her squirm
away from me a little the way my own child does when I squeeze her too hard,
and right before I awake I think, I can’t not do something, I can’t just let
this child go with this owie, without a mommy. All day today, every time I look
at my daughter I think about her as a little, motherless child, clever,
articulate, injured, with no one who would hold her close, this girl alone,
trafficked, used, not an end to herself, growing harder to the world around
her, instead of the little baby I held, her skin against my own. I remember
thinking about Louis C.K.’s quote that you don’t look in to your neighbor’s
bowl to see if you have as much as they do, the only time you look in to your
neighbor’s bowl is to make sure that they have enough.
I’ve been to some shitty places in the world and have been
in some shady circumstances. There are people who have made some incredibly poor
choices in their lives, fucking things up not only for themselves but also for
entire tribes of people around them. But everyone began as a baby small enough
to hide inside her father’s shirt.
