Vacation. Mid-winter February, another city somewhere in America. The world is dull, muted. Colors are dirty faded versions of themselves. Sounds are distant and staticky. Touch is like being separated from the world by a thin wool body suit, taste is bland no matter how much spice is added.
Nothing feels like it should. Maybe memory lies, or romanticizes the past. The only thing that feels real, the only spark of life is brought by negative — anger, sadness, nostalgia. All of which quickly spiral out of control too often to a sense of hopelessness, nihilism, some sort of Nietzschean cage.
On a whim, a text is sent. Questionable purpose, maybe none at all, outside of seeking connection. And another is received, and poetry is shared, and suddenly things start to make some sense — a vague, shapeless, probably imagined sense, but enough so that it feels like a lifeline, or maybe a voice calling out from safety.
A memory:
A crossword puzzle, appropriate for ages 8-14 probably. A picture of galaxies and star clusters and other astronomical bodies set against starry black, probably meant to inspire said pre-teens to learn more about the heavens. The end picture was likely cartoonish, or clearly hand-painted. But it stuck, and eventually became a dream dreamt twice through a life: once the night after completing the puzzle, and once more. The dream was set at night, though you had to just know in your bones that it was night, because it was bright out, the entire globe of the sky filled from one horizon to the other with the puzzle image — galaxies, supernovae, moons, planets, comets — so close that they seem palable if it were actually advisable to touch, say, a red giant or the heart of Andromeda.
That dream was broken by a new day, begun with the strangest mix of raw elation and crushing sorrow, of having been touched by something uniquely beautiful that will never come one’s way again. But the memory, as they say, remains.
Home, current day. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel, only it’s not. Because the dream recurred, as vivid and hyperreal and tactile as memory served. Only on waking, the sense of once-in-a-lifetime enjoyment is lessened. Because the dream returned, for a second and maybe not the last time. Because the waking world is more like remembered from long ago.
Where only weeks before was the cinema of the ’40s, the album quality of the ’50s, the food quality of those horrible ads for Jello and ham and black olive casseroles of the 1970s magazines aimed at lonely housewives chained to their husbands’ bidding — now, here, rich and glorious color in high-definition 8K at 60 frames per second on an IMAX screen, full bullet-time surround sound with a sub-woofer that rattles one’s very soul. The air has that quality of the immediately-post-rain wonder: clean, clear, as though the gods had just finished their weekly washing chores, colors brighter than anyone can remember, that springtime petrichor freeing the mind of everything but the here, the now.
It doesn’t matter so much where we are, as much as: we’re not in Kansas anymore.