Ruby Red Marionette

nineteen | monastic

What I heard when I woke up the next morning could have just been the soft drips of an early drizzle, but engulfed in my deep sleep and indecipherable dreams, my ears somehow morphed the sound into something much greater. I imagined tall, ferocious waves crashing onto boulders on the beach. I tried to be relaxed by the scene, but when each boulder began to look like people in my life (the biggest one being my father) I found myself wanting to escape. The water began to rush past the boulders and onto the shore, washing everything on my beach away with it. The closer it came to touching the barks of the palm trees that led to the forest, the faster my heart beat, and the more I sweat.

I seemed to be on the verge of death when something in my dream caught my eye. There was a small motorboat to my left, its passengers waving at me. I stayed far from them, too consumed in how close I was to drowning. They stopped waving and began to beep a horn at me. The beeping persisted and I stayed put. The sound grew louder and louder, and then abruptly -

“Geneva!”

I rose violently from the bed, my hair matted and wet. The peculiar landscape of the beach faded, and my real surroundings soon settled in: I was in a large, dark bedroom. Sunlight struggled to pass through the thick, closed curtains. The sheets were spread all about me, over one leg and under the other. The room was completely quiet, besides one faraway sound.

I ran out of the room and opened the door. Isaiah stood over the threshold, a bucket sitting next to him.

“Were you asleep?” He lifted the heavy bucket and came inside.

“Yeah, were you ringing the doorbell?”

“For the past five minutes, yes,” He dumped the bucket on the kitchen counter. “It rained last night, and my neighbor called me this morning and said he’d collected and filtered the water in a bucket for me. I went upstairs to pick it up but I forgot my keys in here.”

So my dream was a warped version of this reality.

Isaiah began the process of setting out cups for the water. I watched him search through his cabinets for cups to ration rainwater from his upstairs neighbor. I watched him shift through the kitchen, walking on his marble floors in his high-end condominium in his upscale neighborhood. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t understand him, but he turned around and asked for my assistance in separating the water. We poured a sizable amount into a pot to be boiled in case his neighbor didn’t filter thoroughly, and then waited. In the meantime, I sat on the living room floor and explored the contents of an old suitcase under the TV stand (there was no TV). The suitcase was filled with anime books, elementary school pictures, CDs, old iPods, and old phone books. I was reading one of the anime books when his expired driver’s license fell out. The picture was from about three years ago. He had regular, low-cut hair and razor bumps all over his face.

“That was the license I had when I crashed my car. Ever since then, I dumped it away and never bothered renewing it after it expired.” Isaiah came into the living room. He tossed a Dunkin’ Donuts bag at me; inside, there was a toasted bagel with cream cheese.

“You look different in this picture,” I told him.

“Good different?”

I shook my head. “No. You weren’t ready for the picture, and your chin was kind of up so your head looks really big. And whatever razor you used back then wasn’t your friend. Those dreads that you’re growing now make a big difference, too. You look tired and confused and much less handsome.”

Isaiah, in the middle of eating his own bagel, chuckled. “Thank you.”

I unwrapped mine and hesitantly took a bite. “It wasn’t a compliment.”