I Only Cry When It’s Raining REDUX
I dreamed last night that I cut Tin’s arm off and handed him over to friends in another room who called me because he was bleeding everywhere and then he came out of the room but couldn’t walk straight because he was off balance and I picked him up and tried to caress him and kept apologizing over and over again.
Since there was a thunderstorm rampaging through the city when I woke, I lay in bed thunderstruck and nearly nauseous just thinking about the nightmare. It took telling a friend who called me and snapped me out of my torpor to actually look up what this dream could possibly mean.
Well it turns out many things – since it was his left arm it meant that I was at a loss to nurture him, which could be because he was at Tatjana’s and not here with me. Or it could also be that we both saw a three-legged dog this weekend and it triggered a deeper memory in me because when my mother was in her 40s she unexpectedly got pregnant and then had a miscarriage. She replaced that lost baby with a white and brown puppy named Max and she began to pamper that dog as if he was better than human.
Then one day I had Max in the car with me and he jumped out of the window while I was driving and he injured his leg and it shook like a tremor but the vet said that we had the option to amputate or let it shake. And so we let it shake, but my mother was so sad and I felt so horrible for allowing this to happen.
Later, after my sister and I had left home, my mother came in search of us, leaving stealthily in the van with Max in tow and drove from Atlanta to New Orleans where we had returned to – she put Max up at her mother’s house in the country, and one day he got run over by a car.
I’m not sure if that was the factor that made her return to my dad or a contributing one. But back she went to Atlanta and there Max was, forever lodged in my psyche as proof that humans fuck up and often.
The rest of the day was spent in front of my computer, in my pajamas till the landlady came to check on reports that I have a dog, when I’m not allowed to have one. She really didn’t believe me even though she was standing in the apartment with full view of all the inhabitants.
She left wanting the rent check that I had thought I had sent, which then left my checking account worse for the wear. I guess the second $110 ticket I got on the same damn street with the same damn hidden camera will just have to get in line. Five miles over the speed limit and $220 in debt.
St. Peter don’t you call me because I can’t go, I owe my soul to the … .