Pipe Dream

A short story first published in Mirrormaze (2020)

I climb the ladder, rung after rung, up into the clouds and mist. I watch my hands as they grip, white-knuckled and weary. I have the idea that I might glimpse my own face, but it eludes me.

Who am I in this place? Am I a disembodied spirit, imagining these hands? Imagining this pain in my guts, this unbearable ache in the small of my back? Where am I going in such a hurry? Maybe I should rest a moment, just to—

Before I can finish the thought, the world explodes into a sea of greens and blues and violent hues defying description. I swim for all I’m worth, keeping my head above the technicolor waves. Where have I been all my life? What was I waiting for? Finally, I breathe in the life I’ve always known existed somewhere, just out of reach.

Is this my youth? Where is my quiet desperation, my stoic resignation to a life so ordinary I forget which one is mine? Every chance I get, I scramble for a way to break the pattern, to move beyond the bonds of day to day. But it never works for long. A dream, a trip, a song. In the end, it all comes crashing back to me.

I reach the shore in time: a salty, sandy stretch of sparkling beige. Pushing past the barren beach, I reconnect with grass and grub and shrub and wood. This is the world I love, my certain knowledge all has not been lost, though rearranged and tempest-tossed. I am home.

Is anyone else out here, alone in this paradise? I can make a life of drinking streams, hoarding nuts and berries, catching fish and rabbits if I must. But isn’t someone else around? Is truly no one to be found?

Ah.

There you are.

I’m sorry for my solipsistic bent, the time that I have spent engaged in pointless speculation, even while my degradation threatens to consume what we have meant—to each other and to others in this living, breathing, writhing, squirming place. I see more clearly now. Nothing stays the same or returns to what it was. What was is not; what is was not and never again will be.

We race through forests beautiful and strange, around this tiny globe, until past and future coalesce into a tangled, happy heap of now. How long has it been this way? Was it ever any different? As my attention wanders, I lose my footing in the loamy jungle earth and tumble headlong into the muck.

You bend down to help me up, but it’s too late. We’ve already begun our descent into the ether. I recognize the change that’s coming, the barrier that we’re approaching. I hold you close and wet your clothes with tears. This has all happened before but never just exactly in this way. We were happy for a time. It was nice, and now it’s gone.

Where I’m going, you can’t follow. I wish I could hold onto the memories of this side, my life with you above the clouds. But I’m already forgetting. Your face is once again replaced. I don’t mind. It makes more sense this way, connected to my waking life. As if a dream were just a dream.

My eyes are open now. A familiar taste of bitter burning mothball reek. I feel as if I’ve lost something, but for the life of me, I can’t imagine what.