I’ve dreamed this lake before. Or have I been there, driving the perimeter, not knowing what’s reality; what’s a dream? Lake Tahoe does exist outside myself. It takes a few hours to circle the water in a car and I suppose the lake in my dream last night was Lake Tahoe, but it felt more familiar than that. Like my body of water.
I arrived at the shore, calculating my route along the road, assured I knew my way around the chopping blue waves. Along the piers, people gathered for company and food and I lost sight, or more I cared to ignore, my original intentions for a while. What was my intention anyway? To traverse the cyclical edge only to find myself back in the exact spot I was standing?
“The lure of this place is its ghosts,” a woman along the shoreline said, “And the residents accept them as a quirk. It’s what makes these waters unique.” As she spoke a fog appeared and an invisible hand or being began to erase. Within the negative space, the ghost created a heart.
I was taking pictures with my camera and turned to another pier in time to see the largest moon, planet-sized and pregnant, hovering the water. Before I could get my camera up, the moon was thrown backward into its regular orbit around the earth.
“See what else he can do?” the woman asked, speaking of the ghost. “He moves the moon.” And as she spoke again, the ghost pulled the moon back into our atmosphere, a luminous orb touching the horizon of water. It’s pock marks and craters invisible – all I could see was the light reflecting from itself.
I felt, I knew the ghost was my father.
———-
my father is not dead, but ours is a haunted relationship. There are many other things it could mean. It may not even be “my father” in the sense of my father. But we can’t rewrite dreams. They present themselves as they are and wait for us to catch up.
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