April 23, 2009

I used to love the ocean. I dreamed of being able to afford to live there. Whether in someone's car or on the bus (since I don't drive, I'm always a passenger), the moment a corner was turned and the vista opened before me, the sight of the waves gently rolling toward the beach, the sparkling expanse of opaque sea clear to the horizon and on into the sky — that sight liberated at once my dreams, thoughts, spirit. I'd draw in a deep breath, almost a gasp, as if I'd been suffocating. Stepping out of whatever vehicle had carried me, through every air sac in my lungs, I inhaled the damp salt air, the clean-blowing air.

Yet I've also through those same years had nightmares about tidal waves. A towering swell in the distance is rushing toward shore. A four hundred-foot mountain of water, it will wipe out everything and everyone for twenty miles in its path.

But I cannot escape. I do not have my own means of transportation, and at first no one believes my frantic warning that the wave is coming. Once they do believe it, they shoot away in their cars, fishtailing (as it were) onto the highway, leaving me behind.

In one dream I try to convince the bus driver to hurry away, but he sticks stolidly to his schedule, which gives him his break at this stop. Recalcitrant, deliberately, in the otherwise empty bus, he sits in the driver's seat and eats his lunch. I scream at him but he refuses to leave even when he can see the watery monster racing toward us, that exorbitant power of nature, casting its immense shadow; even when he can hear it hissing and roaring.

I have also always feared undertows, smaller waves, sharks, barracudas and jellyfish, all those smaller monsters about which I have heard from other beach-goers or seen on television or in the movies.

Still, decade upon decade, I've longed to acquire the money to live at the ocean. The deep breath of salty freedom would be my daily fare. If nightmares were the price, I was willing to pay it.

However, a few years ago that vision of myself irrevocably died. There would be no salt air, no lulling surf. I got Rheumatoid Arthritis, and the damp causes me too much pain.

But I've also dreamt for those same years of living in a one-story apartment, flooded not with cold ocean water but with sunlight. Previously all my apartments have been dark, the windows facing the wrong way. Even in my mother's house, where I grew up, the windows were wrong and it was dark. But today, accepted into a Senior Housing complex, I am moving to the desert, where there is almost always sun. In my new apartment, the windows finally face it.

Early brilliance, late afternoon shade, but still sunny across the living room and kitchen, and from the bedroom window, more sunshine washing in, rolling gently across the room. My dreams have come true. I will not fear tidal waves in the desert.

Artists I've known talk about how the light is different at different times of the day and in different places in the world. They paint their souls in the light they find.

I wonder what the new light in my new home will reveal, and allow. I go with all my hope, writing materials, computer, beads and camera.

I will find something.