Maggie Dream

Last night, I dreamt of Maggie.

It was the regular disjointed dream, mostly. I don’t remember lots of it. But in the end, I was at the Wagner Mall in Bend, but like it was when I was a kid. I was in a store that I think I owned, and my Mom was there and the kids. Maggie came in and was talking and piddling around doing stuff, but it was a sidebar to what was going on in the dream.

I walked outside. I was doing something important I thought, but I don’t know what. It was sunny and I was in that alcove entrance where the ice cream shop used to be. Then Maggie followed me out, pulling some sort of kids wagon with a rope for a handle. Sadie was in the wagon, and was having lots of fun. I realized Maggie had to go for some reason, and I said that. And I said good bye, but in a distracted way. Then she started saying goodbye to Sadie. And they played a bit instead of saying good bye. I was distracted by something in the parking lot I thought was important, I don’t know what.

Then it was really time for Maggie to go, somehow. My dream stopped being distracted from that, and it became my focus. I looked over to get her to go and realized how they had been playing and laughing for a while, and I had only been barely aware of it. She picked Sadie up from under a run-down bench by a newpaper machine (the free kind, like an ad. It was light blue and narrower than regular newpaper machines). Sadie gave her a kiss, and they just put their foreheads together, and their noses touching, and just sat there like that for a brief moment.

Suddenly, I was in a panic. I was trying to get my phone out of my pocket – I needed a picture of that moment. But I wasn’t fast enough. Neither of them were of the temperament to linger in those moments. Time sped up in my dream. I tried to convince them to regain the pose a couple of times, but Sadie was restless when they tried. I somehow got them to try several times in a tenth of a second, but it never came and I never got my picture.

I came awake desperately trying to stay asleep, to stay in that moment, to rebuild that pleasant fiction. I woke instead to the certainty of it’s fiction, and to the cold knowledge that I never chose a path to make that moment real. I feel somehow that I glimpsed the quantam foam of another possible reality, and I was distracted because I didn’t belong there, and I didn’t move my existence into that possibility. I was bereft. I am bereft.

Authors Note: When Sula died, I was driven to write about it the next morning, I almost could not stop myself. Later, I would feel guilty about not having the same drive when Grandpa Bob passed, or Grandma Mara. I felt that way even more with Maggie. When I awoke this morning and felt the urge, I had to follow it.

A part of me wants to beleive this was Maggie visiting me and Sadie, somehow. I almost woke Sadie up to ask her about her dream, though I don’t think she could have expressed it if it had matched. Another part of me calls this thinking wishful drivel. I don’t know. But I am sad that this dream ended either way.