On Following Dreams: A Memoir
When I was fifteen, I fell asleep with a candle burning. Throughout the night the wax dripped and melted into a hardened pile on my bedroom carpet. It was a large and unscented white candle I’d bought from a yard sale. My parents weren’t aware of the waxident, and we had just sold our home.
Within days, my family would be moving to Tennessee all the way from California.
I watched, mournfully, as each day the house became more empty, and the candle wax on my carpet remained undetected, yet became harder and harder to face. The wax would glare at me from beneath a fake pile of clean laundry used as disguise, penetrating my conscience as a constant reminder of my negligence. It was going to disappoint my parents once they discovered my pale, unscented, waxy secret. “Maybe they will give up and leave me here?”, I recall bargaining with my conscience.
I had no clue as to how I could remove the pile of wax, and this caused considerable anxiety and conflict within me; a mess I couldn’t clean.
I was desperate for answers, but did I think to ask an adult for advice?
No.
I became so desperate, my subconscious decided to step in and offer me guidance.
A couple of nights before the big day, I had a dream.
I was down on my knees, hovering over the shameful glob of wax. In my right hand I held a meat cleaver. With grace and ease, I sliced the wax clear off the carpet to reveal fresh, clean fibers beneath.
Problem solved!
My eyes popped wide open with resolution and resolve, and I directly went downstairs into an almost empty kitchen. I found the silverware and grabbed the meat cleaver. I marched upstairs to my bedroom and got down on my knees, looming over the soon-to-be-victimized puddle of hardened wax with the meat cleaver in my right hand.
I raised the knife, angled the serrated blade to the root of the carpet and pulled the trigger. The blade came out the other side and I stared at the carpet with complete horror at the ugliest, saddest looking bald spot where the pile of wax once clung.
It quickly became apparent that dream guidance was not the logical resolution to the wax dilemma, and I was now forced to confess.
“What in the HELL were you thinking?!?”, my parents were so mad. I knew they wanted to leave me in California and tell everyone I ran away. Especially after I told them where the idea came from, “I HAD A DREAM!!” I proclaimed, as if it were an impenetrable, logical defense.
That was the last memory made in that house.
As we traveled accross Route 66 along the southwest portion of the US, I pondered deeply the dream and the action I’d taken.
There we were, all four of us, divided between an Oldsmobile cutlass and what was left of a whole life’s worth of objects, crammed into a U-Haul. As we drove further away from the town that was once home to 5 generations of a tight-knit family, I realized we were all severed from our roots, just like that pile of wax, as we made our way to a new life in Tennessee.
