The crisp air wasn’t what got me out that morning; it was the nightmare—the same one I had been seeing in my sleep for the past five weeks. My hands shake thinking about what I saw this time. It’s like watching a Netflix series: a thriller in a foreign language for which you need subtitles on, otherwise you’ll miss the plot. And you have to keep rewinding it to reread the dialogue and watch the scene for the story to move forward. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible when you’re frozen in a nightmare.
My palms get sweaty, and my legs become numb because my brain is engulfed by the dream. I feel the fear in my head, as if it is sitting by my pillow, caressing my hair with a gentle but obvious touch of its long, tender fingers. I know it sounds fake, but no one believes me, however hard I try to explain. My last boyfriend freaked out and left in the middle of the night. I still wear his ‘Moo point’ t-shirt; it is very soft. He left in a hurry.
Last night was no different. I tried to open my eyes, but failed midway. The bright orange of the lamp only made my eyes water more. Everything was blurry, like my eyes were being forced to open, but my brain kept reminding me to go to sleep. I know what I saw. I don’t mean to be rude, as I can’t even tell you if it was a he or a she. Let’s go with “they,” to be safe. I don’t want to offend anyone after the embarrassing incident at work. I got scolded by a colleague two weeks ago; they had made it very clear that their pronouns were they/them, and yet I had continued to address them as her/she. So, when I was called out during the briefing on the new project, “Destroying Trees or Humanity?” (so grateful for this job), I learned my lesson the hard way. That was one embarrassing moment I will not be getting over anytime soon. Mom says we all have to be embarrassed at some point in our lives to become better people. Her great example was finding pieces of chia seeds stuck to her teeth and a barista laughing at her as she ordered herself a bowl of chia pudding after work. It didn’t stop her from eating all that chia—she just carries mouthwash and floss in her bag now. “See, embarrassed into taking care of my teeth.” “Your teeth show how healthy you are” was her mantra that month.
Anyway, getting back to the dream. As I tried to open my eyes to look around, taking in everything in my room and reminding myself that it was only a nightmare and not my reality, I saw her sitting in the chair—my favorite before-bed reading spot—staring at me and talking to me. Now, remember I told you about subtitles? In a nightmare, there isn’t an option for them. All I saw were her lips moving and her hands gesturing. As her pale pink lips moved, my palms got sweatier.
All I could see was that they were wearing a brown saree, a very traditional garment. I will need to research the kind of saree I saw them wearing. They were so animated and used their hands a lot while talking, and that is when I noticed their two missing fingers. Again, thanks to my blurred vision, I cannot be sure which ones, but I think it was the ring and middle finger of the right hand. I felt sorry for them—what if they wrote with their right hand? My eyes became more watery, and that’s when they stopped talking and looked straight at me.
They walked up to me from the white of the chair, raising their left hand—thank God—to caress my head. That is when I woke up to this world. A gentle breeze from the window I had left open after reading felt like a cooling towel on my burning forehead. My eyes were strangely not crusty and were wide open now. But there it was, right next to the chair: a piece of brown cloth stuck under the leg of the chair. And that is when I remembered them walking up to me, but first turning around to pull on the long drape of the saree, called the pallu, which was stuck somewhere. They made it toward me but lost a piece of themselves somewhere in the struggle to get to me. And here it was in my room, reminding me that we are all just energy and that no one really dies; our energy is absorbed into things. Things we have loved and cared for. Things that meant something to us. Things that have our stories written on them. Things I have bought and picked up from the sidewalks because they looked like my style and fit through my apartment doorway.
I stared at the chair, lifting it a little to release the brown piece of cloth, gently stroking its softness. I walked back to my bed, picked up the box on the nightstand, and placed it in a plastic ziplock bag with a piece of paper: ‘A middle-aged woman with short brown hair, wearing a brown-colored saree, sat on a chair, left this behind.’ As I placed it gently in the box among the others, I looked around the room—at the dresser where I found a gold ring after three months of nightmares, the mirror covered with a scarf with owls printed on it after three weeks of it shattering every night and showing up all set in the morning. My favorite was this diary I found in both the nightstands after my headache every night for only three nights, until I opened the nightstand and found the diary of a thirty-something young mother. She wrote every night for a year, as per the dates I could make out.
My palms felt dry, as did my throat. I put on my shoes to head out for a walk. I was up for a reason.
‘Once Upon Another Time’ playing in my ears, a soft breeze gently stroking my skin, I turned onto Maplewood Rd and noticed the flyer stapled to the tree: ‘Estate Sale TODAY from 10 am to 5 pm.’
Black Coffee and Grey Stories 