I had a dream I was walking toward a flooded boardwalk. It was morning, no fog. It was morning and no one was around. The sea lapping wood; high enough to harbor seals swimming on our side of the world. Their metallic heads matched the sea but glimmered, their heads poked out like fingers. I thought they were trapped on the boardwalk and couldn’t get back to the sea. So I walked up from a deserted street, my clothes suddenly cold and wet. I remember not caring. I approached two seals, hoping to corral them back over the railing, but as I got closer, they jumped back on their own. They didn’t need my help at all, they just enjoyed being there.
As I continued down the boardwalk, I passed more seals and let them be. They looked at me, jumped back in the water. Until I reached the end, there was a mother and her child sitting waist deep in the water. Both blond, the mother looked like a house wife.
As I talked to them, I discovered they were both seals, but had the ability to take on human form. The little girl was fascinated by me, she had never felt a human before. I let her touch my skin and my face and I said “Look, feel my hair” and lowered my head to her, in the dream my hair was long and blond and the child reached out, stroked my hair and laughed with so much wonder.
As I left, I climbed steep stairs into something darker, people were rising in the day, but I was walking into their chaos. I could feel it. The seal-woman with her baby in her arms came running after me, “She starting screaming when you left,” the mother gasped, “she didn’t want you to leave.”
I’m not sure what happened then, but the sun was out. The light gold against a beach town. Sun spots across houses made gutters disappear, roofs, windows. I had befriended a girl, who was also a seal and she had to return to sea soon. We both agreed we could never have been, whatever we were, I’m not sure. But she had a difficult time trusting anyone, she was a loner who had made a connection with me and I a connection with her and all we knew was we loved each other, we had a deep understanding.
We walked the boardwalk again, the sun low, but not setting. The sea had receded and she put her hand on my back and I said, “how do you do it? Is it like a switch? Do you just envision yourself doing it and it happens? How do you become a human?”
She looked at me smiling with such a secret, such an ability she knew I’d never posses. And said, “Yeah, you just see it in your mind and it happens. See…” and her hand on my back turned into its truer form. I couldn’t see it, all I could do was feel how fingers turned flat and rigid.
We approached a house, deserted for the season and climbed to the widow’s peak. This was her secret spot where she kept a calendar surrounded with cobwebs nailed to the ceiling. She fanned back a few months and said “Look, I wrote down when I met you.” It was something more elaborate, a sentence or two, something I can’t quite remember, but what I felt was ‘this person cares that I’m around.’
From the ground, we see a young woman approach. My friend gets territorial immediately. The girl looks wealthy despite the fact that she’s wearing a gray sweatshirt. It’s the ribbons in her hair, the pearls in her lobes. But she starts crying “I was supposed to meet my parents here, we traveled separately, but they didn’t show, they deserted me.”
We sat on the lawn, I became very motherly and I tucked the young girl, she was 18, into my chest and wrapped my arm around her.
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