New Memories of Old Things

 I woke from a bad dream and felt my mother there to comfort me on the edge of my Jurassic Park themed bed. I tell her what happened in my nightmare, even though the memory is starting to become hazy at that point, but then she takes me into the kitchen. I sit down at the table, where my legs dangle above the floor, and I see through the slim doorframe that she is ruffling through the food cupboard. The lighting is still low in the room, with the only light coming from the hallway, so she must be having a hard time finding what she wants. Eventually she pulls out a bag of dry spaghetti noodles. Once she sits down at the table with me, she pulls a single strand of pasta from the bag and holds it out to me like a magic wand.

           “Take this in both hands,” she says, “and try to break it in half as evenly as possible.”

           The task seems easy enough, and the noodle snaps with little pressure applied upon it. She takes the shorter of the two sides, and tells me to do the same again. And I do the same again.

           “Keep trying to break the pasta until you can’t break it into any smaller pieces,” she instructs as she pulls away another half of the edible straw. I do so without question, until the pieces are so small I can’t even fit my fingers around the edges.

           “You broke the noodle into six smaller pieces, that means you’ll have 6 more hours of good sleep.” I see her start to wipe up all the broken pieces and dump them into the trash, when everything fuzzes out of focus and I wake up for real, in my current adult bed.

           I thought a dream within a dream was only in soap operas. The most disturbing part of the whole experience was having my mother there. Where did I even think up of that idea? She never did anything nurturing, let alone the breaking a spaghetti noodle trick. I toss and turn, and try to go back to sleep.

           But after a few moments, the nightmare comes back again.

           It wasn’t really a nightmare, more of an uncomfortable reoccurring dream I’d been having since I was a preteen, where I am driving in a car, but for some reason I’m left behind on the road with the stirring wheel still in my hands, but the vehicle continues propelling forward. I have to maintain control of the car’s movements, or else I will cause an accident. I don’t know why I dreamt that same scene over and over again as a child? Maybe it was my subconscious telling me I wasn’t ready to make decisions on my own yet?

           I wake up again, and my mother is by my side brushing my damp hair out of my face. “Another bad dream?” she asks. I nod, and she takes my hand to lift me out of the bed.

           She passes me a paintbrush as big as my hand, and holds a bucket of half empty light coloured paint. I can’t really tell if it is white or light grey, because the lights are still off in my room.

           She tells me, “We will paint the walls, and that way, the bad dreams will be painted over, and never come back again.” So I dip the paintbrush in, only a little bit, so the tips of the bristles are coated with what looks like melted ice cream. I pull the straw brush up and down on the wall, and see the glisten of the new paint reflecting the yellow streetlights.

           I think the idea of fresh paint smell is what wakes me fully from the second dream. Maybe I’m too hot, and I need to turn my ceiling fan on? I never painted anything with my mother. Why would I think I had? One time, while I was studying at college, she called me to say she was having my room repainted, as part of her renovating the home, and when I came back for a holiday weekend, it was painted a bright blue, like rock candy.

           “I knew how much you like the beach,” she said, “so I picked blue.”

           “I didn’t think this shade occurred in nature without artificial coloring?” I answered.

           “Well, it’s done now, so whatever,” she replied.

           I look at my side table for my glass of water and see the rotini noodle I pulled out earlier. I figured I should try that trick to see if there was any merit to it, but all I had was a package of spiral noodles. I succeeded at breaking the piece three times before it crumbled apart between my fingers.

           I guess it doesn’t really work then.

           I notice I haven’t had that same nightmare lately since I moved to the city and sold my car. All the places I need to go, the bus or train can get me there. I always hated driving, and tried to postpone getting my license as long as I could.

           “I’m tired of driving you around everywhere. You’re 18, get your damn license already.”

           My freshman year of college, I got into my first car wreck. I managed drift into the other lane, and instinctually overcompensated the wheel. I drove through the ditch for a few yards before I remembered I could slam on the break, but a tree branch caught in the front axle, causing my 2008 Envoy to flip over three times. The car finally stopped upside down. I remember not feeling any pain in my body, but I was too afraid to move, in case more cars behind me would accidentally collide with my corpse of a vehicle. I unbuckled, and crawled through the broken side window into a dirty ditch.

           When the tow truck managed to flip the Envoy up, we could see how concave the roof of my car had become, and if it had flipped one more time, it would have crushed my skull and neck. I asked my mother to pick me up from the side of the road. On the ride home, I flinched at every car that drives by us, to which she says, “Can you just relax?”

           That’s what I try to think now. “Can you just relax?” I just stare up at my spinning fan and try to count myself to sleep.