Our Life Outsung

There was sunshine, a cooling breeze, twittering birds, and green for miles; I was the doting son she’d always wanted.

In the dream we got along. She sat outside on a yellow and white striped lawn chair with a small white metallic table in front of her. On the table, a piece of unfinished wood, and on that, a wedge of brie. I was out in the lush forest surrounding the house looking for berries and although we were separated by acres our love put distance to shame: I knew exactly how she held the knife she used to press the white chunk into the grainy brown bread. What she did, how she felt, all of her was with me as I looked for fruit to accompany our afternoon meal. Her eyes swung from the bread in her hand to the green horizon.

There was no one else around. The two of us and the fields and jungles and orange groves stretching away from the house, which had become the center of all life--the same house I grew up in, surrounded by a better life than I remember. Even the air was fine and pure, as if mankind had just been born. Just the right amount of crickets, too, which is to say, not so many that the mockingbirds were outsung.

Mama hummed. No, she sang. She sang softly and waited patiently for me to return. Her hair was rich and brown like flowing mud, and it played with the streaming breeze, just how she has always wished it were (not the thinning and stiff dry strands it is). Nothing has ever been as perfect as in this dream.

All my yearnings—vanished. Life was complete. It wasn’t life, come to think of it...but a glimpse of some kind of heaven. Hers. So why, every time I put out my hand to move aside the leaves of dense webbed foliage, did I feel the rush of happiness? Just berries. That’s all that mattered then. The thrill of finding fruit. What a jester life is, to make so much more matter when we’re awake, when in dreams we're happy with so much less.