My nightmares are memories of the past and memories of what happened in the future. This always happens to me and I had learned to pay attention to it, as early as three years old when I had thought that my earliest memory was a dream but it had happened.
I had thought about the dream, wondering if it were real as I traced with my fingertips the tears on my lower lids. I sat, drew the curtains open to my windows, looked at the blue-grayness outside, and remembered all the details. I was deciding if the nightmare had happened in the future.
Sometimes, the dreaming world and the waking world are one. It just takes time for the present in the waking world to catch up with past in the dreaming world. Déjà vu is when we finally see the future happen here, now: a present that is a past.
When I know that my dream happened in the future and it is something that makes me cry, I don’t write about it. Writing it would make it real. Instead, I go outside and find a tree and tell the tree my dream.
I was taught (by whom? I don’t know) that if I had a nightmare that I didn’t want to happen, I should tell it to a tree. When we used to live in Masikap, our housekeeper and sometimes my father would catch me getting out of bed at odd hours of the night to go outside and to whisper to a tree.
They didn’t ask me why I was doing what I was doing.
They only asked, “What is it?”
I would only say, “Just a bad dream.”
In my dream, he had died of an illness.
Slide: In that house there was a husband and a wife in the midst of a separation. The wife was looking for a key to this box where her husband kept his secrets. She wanted to know. He had always kept the key with him but there I was and I had stolen it from him. When he left, I gave it to his wife.
Slide: They were wearing ski parkas.
Slide: Then someone was taken to a hospital. I found myself in an emergency room. I found myself holding that tube they put down your throat when you have to be supported by a respirator. I was holding it, unopened in a plastic bag.
Slide: He had a tube down his throat but he wasn’t breathing. His flesh still looked like his skin but he wasn’t breathing. I sat beside him and held his hand, stroking it. I knew he wasn’t sleeping.
Slide: I began crying and whispered, “I still owe you a kiss. I can’t kiss you like this.”
Slide: I stopped crying because I knew that he doesn’t like it when I cry.
Slide: I went underground, to a dream world, where couples were walking. Women were holding onto men’s elbows with their left hands, the men holding the women’s left hands with their left hands, the women’s right hands were holding parasols.
Slide: They were walking by a canal, with one gondola, in the dark. They were walking in 18th century suits and gowns.
Slide: The wife had taken their daughter down there. They were wearing ski parkas, she in red, the daughter in pink. They began walking to the right, where at the end there were street lights, laughter, cafés, a party. They looked out of place but no one stared at them.
Slide: Above ground, the husband was in a restaurant with another woman, laughing.
Slide: I found myself in a wake, his wake. I did not look at the coffin. I was seated on a dirty-white Monobloc chair. A woman, looking like the typical weathered public high school teacher, was calling everyone’s attention, calling the roster of those who would read a eulogy.
Slide: They were all waiting for what I would say, wanting to know what I meant to him.
Slide: She said, “Now we’ll take a break and resume after.”
Slide: I started laughing and said, “He would laugh his ass off at that.”
Slide: She said, “Shut up.”
Slide: I said, “He wouldn’t like that. He likes it when I talk and he listens.”
Slide: I began crying.
Slide: Outside, there was snow.
There was snow…This did not happen.
He had replied, “I’m sure you won’t. Now rest, you’re tired. I’m sorry you dreamt something like that. But that’s all it is, just a dream. It’s ok.”
I had tried going back to sleep but there was a eulogy being read in my head. I got out of bed, started writing this.
I had written that eulogy in
The one who is supposed to read it had almost cried when I read it to him two years ago. He never read it silently or out loud ever:
“Some time ago, my wife and I were having dinner when she suddenly said, ‘In my funeral, nobody will have anything to say about me because everything they know that truly matter are secrets. It will be so quiet and the priest or some passer-by will think that I’m such a terrible person because no one has anything to say about the dead woman.’
She laughed and laughed while I couldn’t say anything for a time, overwhelmed by panic, anger, and sadness at the idea of life without her. My wife had a quirky sense of humor--- what she considered hilarious was horrifying. But because she was laughing, you cannot help but laugh with her, too.
I see how silent we all are today and I see that my wife is right. My wife was always right. She’ll tell you that it will rain tomorrow and it does. She’ll tell you that you’ll lose your money and you will, especially if you’re playing cards with her. She’ll tell you that you’ll have a baby girl even before you’re pregnant and it comes true. There was even a time that she told someone that she’ll lay an egg. Thankfully, that ‘someone’ was a hen…She’ll tell you that all your happy dreams will become real and one by one they will.
And she was right about today. No one has spoken a word because you like the secrets that she has kept with you. After all, after…that is what you will only have of her, something of hers that is only yours. She’ll be happy to know that she’s right once more. Oh, you know how she hates to be wrong. She explodes into ranting, screaming, and throwing anything she can get her hands on, then cry and cry…None of us could stand it when she cries. Or she would seethe silently as she plots to make things go the right way, her way, of course.
But just for today, she will be wrong. She never thought that I would speak of her because in life I never could. You all know that between her and me, she’s more of the talker. But today…I want to talk about my wife. I want the heavens to hear of my wife.
My wife understood love, and gave so much of her self until nothing much was left. She loved so many, especially those who needed it the most, and they loved her, too. Sometimes, I hated sharing her love with everybody else. But my love was hers and hers alone and it was more than enough for the two of us. Sometimes, I hated that she shared her secrets of her self with others when her secrets should have been mine alone.
Sometimes, I hated it when she wants to be alone. She never tells me when but she simply sits beside me, close to me, and then she goes far away, somewhere else, somewhere secret…while sitting beside me. She was afraid to be alone even when she wants to be a lone. I was afraid that someday she would never come back.
Today is that day. She will never come back. My wife was never really ours, we all just borrowed her from this day…but she will always be mine.
And one day you will no longer be alone…On that day, I will be with you.”
I had forgotten that I wrote this and that it is in an English textbook that did not have my name. Now here it is. I claim it as mine.
The eulogy came to me in a dream that I had forgotten. In the dream, I was not old at all.
When I wrote it, I had said, “Déjà vu.”
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