I did the thing I said I’d do. I sat still. Eight nights running, twenty lousy minutes at a stretch, feeling like the world’s biggest fraud, listening to my own knees and the refrigerator and that hum that says visitor. Nothing. Six nights of nothing. I was about ready to call the whole thing what my father would’ve called it.
Then last night the wall came down.
I want to be careful here, because I’ve spent this whole week sorting the real from the wishful, and I owe you the same care. This was not a dream. I know dreams; I’ve got a graduate degree in them by now. A dream you wake out of. This I woke into. One second I’m sitting on the floor of my own apartment with my back against the radiator, and the next I am — also — somewhere else, fully, with weight and weather and a body that isn’t this one, and it doesn’t feel like imagining. It feels like walking back into a house you lived in as a kid and finding every single thing exactly where you left it, down to the smell.
It was the gold. The world from the dream. Only I wasn’t aching for it from far away this time. I was standing in it. And it knew me. That’s the part I can’t get past — the place knew me, the way a place knows you when you belong to it, and for about four seconds I was not a visitor anywhere in the universe. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Forty-one years of that hum, and for four seconds, silence. Home.
Then the radiator was cold against my back and I was just a guy on the floor, crying again — I’ve cried more this week than in the previous decade, I’m aware of how this sounds — but not from relief this time, and not from shame. From the size of it. From realizing the thing I’ve been homesick for my whole life is a real place, and I’m from there, and somewhere between there and this apartment I did something that cost me the right to feel that way all the time.
I’ve been somewhere before this. Somewhere that wasn’t here. And tomorrow — God, I can hardly write it — I think I’m finally going to remember how it started.