Bicycle Thief

Nowhere near a thousand words until you repeat them ad nauseum.

Two nights ago I dreamt we were bicycling together to your house where the lights were dim and you reluctantly showed me a frightening dark tiled room adjacent to the kitchen and dining room which were conversely filled with art and kitsch ephemera. The tiled room did not scare me as such. I think you believed it would. It just made me mournful. You held me long enough for us to comfort each other. We then took off into grassy paths that ran through the city, and you warned you may want to stop to pick up interesting trash, knowing that this is what I would have done. What a delight. You asked if I had anything to do that afternoon. My time was very limited by pending obligations to work, but I lied and said it wasn’t. We entered a large art gallery that reminded me of Hauser and Wirth in Manhattan. The current exhibition featured bicycles and skateboards covered in moss and other micro-flora. You freely rode the implements as if they were not art, and no one stopped you, though I was anxious we’d get in trouble and was the one claiming more attention from the other patrons and staff, wringing my hands and pacing. You held me and said it was going to be OK. I found a trove of gigantic magic mushrooms. I pored over them, pun intended. Outside you found a vintage bike and decided to take it with you until you realized it was an e-bike and became disgusted. It was both vintage and electric, so I knew this was the future.

Yesterday morning on my way to move the car from its expired parking spot, I crossed paths with a man with the same height but not build, as an ex-boyfriend. I stopped in my tracks momentarily and stared, because he had an identical tattoo on an identical location (left forearm). The man looked back at me, perplexed. I interpreted that as reciprocated recognition. Was this him? He couldn’t possibly have changed that much since the 2000s, and I couldn’t possibly have forgotten what he looked like. Could we? So this is the future, too. A torrent of rain water flooding the corners of my memories to determine and recognize you, always there. I am an open shed flooded by these incessant dreams.

This morning I thought about sending mail to friends. Letters are like dreams, sent to the future and attenuated by travel. Someone once told me what they’d learned through a podcast about our postal service: the reason we get mail delivered to our doorstep. It seems death notifications during the Civil War were shipped to a community (i.e. a general store or post office), but mourning family members receiving news of dead children would react so violently to their grief in public that the decision was made to deliver this mail directly to the homes of recipients. Mail is delivered to our doorstep thanks to grief. To think, there was a universe in which grief would continue to be performed in public. To think, I will forever be grateful for the grief between us giving me a doorstep to recognize.