Upside Down Notes

My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past, But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast, - H. W. Longfellow "The Rainy Day"

Upside Down Notes

Reckless Rambles

A Bad Memoir of Little Memories

 

“How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fishbowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here.”

-          Pink Floyd “Wish You Were Here”

 

“If I lay here,

If I just lay here,

Would you lie with me and just forget the world?”

-          Snow Patrol “Chasing Cars”

 

The saddest factor about these words is they are the only way I can talk to you now. I can only speak to you with my pen, lost in my thoughts, and with no way of hearing your voice again.

                It is the saddest truth I know about the dead. Only the living can talk to them. Only the living can talk about them.

                I once believed, and maybe, I still do, that our dreams were our soul's going on adventures. When we wake, our souls have come back to us, whispering the tale of those long nights, and I feared for many years that maybe our souls could get lost on the way back to our bodies. I would lay awake at night still with terror at the thought of what would happen if my soul never made it back to me. Would a demon find their home in me? Would I be lost in the Woods of Dreams? Would that be so bad?

                And yet, I had a dream about you last night. Does this mean our souls can meet the dead? Isn’t death nothing but a long sleep? If the dead are merely sleeping, I want to believe I can come across them in the Woods of Dreams. It is a belief I hold onto tightly and only whispered about it in my work.

                Outside of this letter to you, no one else knows I have this belief.

                I’m sure the question is why I don’t share the belief. I don’t know; there is a part of me that wants to keep it to myself. A single belief, personal to me, and if I only talk about it in hush tones, then I don’t have to understand why I have it. I can just have it.

                Is that so wrong?

                I hope not.

                I don’t care if it is.

                But the dream has lingered with me all day. You have painted my day in many different hues. Ones in which I can’t look away from but stand in awe of them. Colors of the night from the Woods of Dreams highlighting your smile and your tearful eyes.

                I awoke this morning wishing to call you, but my phone doesn’t reach the other side. I can’t ring up the dead anymore. All I can do is write this letter to you knowing I can’t send it, knowing you can’t read it, and it breaks my heart open for the Ravens.

                I raced from my bed away from those Ravens looking for a notebook that I no longer have, but you handed it back to me in those woods. I believe in the haze of my dream; it was still with me. It was a composition notebook I had written to you years ago. I had this mad idea, all my ideas were mad back then, and I poured out everything I could into the pages of the notebook.

                We should have known right then, and there I was doomed to be a writer.

                I put every belief, emotion, and idea of you in those pages. I wrote with care and hast about how I felt about you. I gave it to one random day. I can’t recall the day or the how or even the why, but your name was written as the title. I made sure to use a Sharpie to print your name out carefully. My handwriting was bad back then. It hasn’t got any better.

                You took the book not sure why I  had done this or what you would find in the pages. They were soaked with ink dripping with emotions locked away from you and longing to touch you. I couldn’t back then show you what I was keeping inside me. I didn’t know how to let it all out until it came flooding out. I’ve gotten better at letting myself feel, but you can’t see it. I can’t show you the new me. You are dead, and I am not.

                Later, days, maybe weeks, you called me crying. It was nothing new to you or me. I picked up the phone, hearing my name cloaked in tears, and I reached for my car keys. Like so many times before, I knew I had to come to get you, save you, keep you safe. I failed in the long run. I didn’t save or keep you safe; it is one of the reasons you are lost in the Woods of Dreams now. One but not the main reason. The main reason falls on you. You put the needle in your arm, and it was you who wanted to take the ride.

                But you weren’t crying because your father had flipped his mind doped on pills again. You were crying because of my words. You weep with me for a long time before uttering a word. You didn’t understand why I loved you so deeply.

                To tell you the truth, I still don’t understand it.

                After we talked a while about those words, the hidden emotions of the ink, and I knew when I handed you the book, nothing would come from it. Nothing did come from it. I never hated you for not loving me back. You did love me back, not the way I wished, but I saw it then, and I see it now. It is the why I am putting these thoughts to the page now. I knew who you were back then, and I knew the love I wanted couldn’t come from you.

                I was okay with it then. I’m okay with it now because you never made me feel shame for saying those things to you. You were kind to me. You took care of my heart but never lie to me about your heart, and I always loved you for it.

                After the tears had stopped, you asked me why I wrote on the back of the pages upside down. It was a simple reason, I hate writing on the left side of a page, but it stuck with you. I often wondered if you keep that notebook with you throughout your days. I would sit staring out a window on a perfect summer day thinking about you, hoping you knew a person was strolling around in this world who loved you.

                It is a perfect summer day, Catherine, as I write this to you. The sky is blue above me, and I can’t help but keep my windows down while riding around. I try not to see you out of the corner of my eye with a smile on your face and your hand petting the wind. On days like today, I hope I’m still asleep, and my soul is driving the car, but the truth is hard and unloving …all I can do is write this letter to you on upside-down paper.

                All I can do is burn this letter. If dreams are our souls walking in the Woods of Dreams, burning a letter is killing the work and sending it to the other side. As the wind holds the ashes of this letter, I like to believe they are flying to your hand. It is so wrong to believe you can write to the dead. Ture or not, the fire is sending you, my words.

                The cruel fate of the flames is you can’t write back.

                Only the living can talk to the dead. Only the living can talk about the dead. It is cruel, but it is true, like so much of the truth.  

 

We’ll see each other again,

Chase