What I Understand
I dreamed of a man with a gun in a food store and how he brought me with him to a corner. What he wanted was to sleep, I needed to be unscared enough to take a gun. I smelled it out, that he had to be disarmed, for his own damn good. I laid it close for him to see and he wrapped his large arms around himself on the ground while I stood watch, careful. Don’t touch that gun, I told the sweeper, the man with lettuce leaves in his broom. We need it close.
I knew this even in a dream because in the day, the small ones, the ones who can’t speak and are running from me or running at me are asking to be disarmed, to be cradled on the ground or somewhere equally steady enough to hold all of them, every blessed part. They cannot say this and so I interpret it this way, my hunch that works every time, the disarmament of quiet unafraid. One boy who can speak said once that he is shut in a room if he is asking too hard for love. He told me this, in a way, or I understood it that way, like I came to understand I had to take the gun, pluck it like a flower. He doesn’t like the picture on the wall of our classroom of the closed door. I hate you, he hears.
I understand now what pleonastic means, the way that words can be too much and clunk around unnecessary like a set of dumbbells in a suitcase. The way that if we can get pleonastic enough, the sting of the truth can be lessened, the shit we have to say to get away won’t smart, and we may even fool ourselves that it isn’t really sleep and the ground we want, something steady enough to cradle us. The boy who fears closed doors and the man with the gun, at least they speak the simple truth, same as the other boys who wail and run, so very small and no words at all. The one in the dress, I know he has no house. He loves this dress, the blue green one with light layers of tulle and swirled roses on top and a sash. I would have loved it too, at 4, like him, would have asked nicely for a turn to wear it every day, a chance to swish it against my legs like a princess.
Other things I understand now: why the princess must be locked in the tower, how for worship, she has to stay in one damn place. The way the rest of the world demands that she become a serpent and a shape-shifter, a healer and a cradle, a real efficient witch. A prince’s muscular forearms or a dragon’s shiny claws, does it matter which is which if all she does in the clutch of both is get carried, high above the earth, dress swishing against her pleonastic legs?
I am taking curious stock of other ways to get through: look she is the one who drinks and he the one who stays. Look, he is the one who sucks in saving the world like a drug and she the one who picks up the dirty pieces. Look, I am the one who lives off the smell of your admiration and you the one who waits around for it to take.
