Once Upon a Lucid Dream

          When you’re someone who goes to festivals, it’s easy to forget that there are people who DON’T. There are people who think “energy healing” is a form of Clif bar. There are also those for whom a “transformational” gathering—complete with fire-spinning, sage-burning, and copious amounts of face-touching—is something akin to a weekend in hell. “I think Patrick might like to go to Lucidity,” my mother told me; meaning my stepfather, the same man currently puttering around in the garage, and the proud owner of nearly two dozen paintings of poker-playing dogs. “Don’t you think?”

            I looked at her, trying to find the best way to say no, I think he’d rather spend a week under military torture than have hundreds of gorgeous hippies ask him about his feelings; however, I just laughed. Who am I to judge what person will benefit from three days under the oaks? Just because my tent looked like I sneezed out four pounds of glitter, who am I to say that someone who sat in silence for the duration of the festival—feeling, perhaps, that he was in the exact wrong place, wishing he could be anywhere else—didn’t transform just as much, if not more?           

             6,000 festivals just happened, oftentimes within the same person. Oftentimes before breakfast. There is no such thing as one “festival experience”: the whole is woven of countless little threads, each one leading to a particular version of heaven. Whether heaven was pounding a dance floor, covered in dust, or the rogue avocado that got squished to your pillow—it’s all part of the cloth, and heaven just the same. All I have is the way that I feel; so here I go, tugging.

            The week before Lucidity, Jill asked me for fashion advice. Mind you, I’ve never considered myself to be a “festival person”; I still forget earplugs, and at least once during each gathering can be found hiding under the covers, wishing my face didn’t stink of patchouli and sunscreen. I’m no more well versed on the intricacies of festival season than I am on any other season, baseball and television included. Still, when asked, I can provide a pretty accurate orientation on the rules for dressing at festivals: mainly because, there are none. Feel good, I told Jill. Feel silly. Because, after all, bound up in the intense ephemerality of festival culture—and the fact that whatever you choose to glue on your navel, braid through your hair, or stuff in your boots, it’s all gotta fit in the trunk of someone’s Volvo—runs a deep appreciation for the absurd: the chic, the dangerously zany. “So,” she asked, palming her hair from her forehead. “If I bring a pink boa and Valkyrie hat, I should be good, right?”

            Correct.

            Fashion within chaos is one of many ironies bound up in festival culture: the most glaring of which, perhaps, being to ‘Leave No Trace.’ The fundamental concept of creating a temporary city out of thin air leaves, well, a bit of a trace—and you can bet that for every well-intentioned mermaid separating her paper from plastic, there are at least a hundred eighteen-year-olds wondering how many cans of PBR they can bury behind their tent. It’s inevitable. However, the idea of tracelessness begs more than the question of whether we can leave the land the way we found it. Besides pillars of bamboo, the countless vendors, mason jars, LED lights, and camp stoves, what happens when thousands of people pack an entire coming-of-age into the course of a weekend? Regardless of whether our tire tracks can be seen in the dust, can that much energy simply dissipate from whence it came? Would we even want it to?

            That’s the thing about transformational festivals: they are miniature lifetimes, disguised as weekends. One can’t show up without expecting to encounter a little puberty. Now, I’m no Lorax; I can’t begin to speak for the trees, nor the countless glow-sticked Lucidibeings who spent the entire festival on a wave of compassion and bliss. Perhaps theirs was paradise, pure and simple. However, to claim that my experience was entirely positive would deny a fundamental aspect of what I value most about these things: that within each festival, as within a life, there are peaks and valleys. Reuben put it best when he said that for some, the transformation occurs when you park a mile away from the site and schlep your bag up a hill. For others, it’s lying in a cold tent, feeling the weight of Alone. If you’re lucky, you come face-to-face with the things you like least about yourself: because oh, how the mighty fall when the Porta Potties stop getting serviced! When their friends ditch them, when they can’t find their toothbrush! In the end, though, it’s not the difficult moments that outweigh the whole; the people you’d rather not see, the snippy remarks that emerge from camping with friends. One needn’t watch MTV to know that when you throw a bunch of people in a teepee, shit happens. No: the difficult moments simply lend credence to the victorious ones, reminding us of their beauty, providing contrast. Like the negative space within a painting, it’s the cave that reminds us of the light.

            So you’re spat into the Universe, discover face paint for the first time, hit an awkward growth spurt around Saturday night when your sleeplessness kicks in, and circle around to the glow of wisdom by Sunday afternoon; hopefully in tea with close friends, catnapping in the shadow of a cycle well-spent. But what happens on the other side, when you’re forced to reintegrate into life as you left it? For me, after an hour-long struggle with a dead car battery and spastic descent down the 154, I went straight to my job as a cocktail waitress. I probably don’t need to explain what a challenge this was for you to imagine me there, sun-drenched and sad—with a nose full of dust—seeking a flicker of recognition in my customers’ eyes. There’s a reason for decompression parties. After a week spent engulfed in the festival blaze, the default world seems vanilla; you see an accordion, and feel bummed when it doesn’t spit bubbles. What do you mean, it’s socially inappropriate for me to kiss someone on the mouth every time they deliver my coffee? What do you mean, you don’t want to hold hands? Like every good teen movie, there’s the moment you look at your festival family—buoyed by the connection that lingers so effortlessly, bringing you home—and ask: What happens when we leave? Like the kids in The Breakfast Club, leaning on archetypes, all hormones and fear: “When we see each other in the halls on Monday, will we say hi?”

            The truth is, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes, reintegration is selfish and swift; and before you know it, you’ve forgotten the feel of that one perfect shower, and are worrying about things like loan payments and bras. You’ve forgotten the people who occupied space, who became all you wanted, if just for a night. In that way, festivals are like summer camp: as Isabel put it, a land where you gauge your successes and failures within the microcosm of Friday to Sunday. Alive Stage to tent. On the one hand, when the “real world” returns and what seemed like the Biggest Mistake is now distant and mute, there’s relief. You exist, you move on. On the other, like a postcard dug up from a sea of old summers, we must learn to re-read what we felt. We sink into the evidence, a talisman of feelings past, to remember the weight of what seemed like the whole. After all, isn’t it better to have wandered around the festival, looking but not looking for that person you made eye contact with—who saw you, who you may have decided to love—than not to have loved at all?

            Yes.    

            At their core, that’s what festivals are: the bold-faced desire to create something beautiful out of the extraordinarily temporary. I felt it when we set up our teepee, stringing fabric and lights in the trees, filling our nest with live music and baskets of food. I felt it again when we hung lengths of silk across a chain link fence, bunching and lifting just so, making it lovely for just that: to be. To exist for three days before the same crew of people rolled through with Kubotas and screwdrivers, tearing down everything they just worked a year to create. Maybe it’s weird to decorate a dumpster. But if you don’t at least try to make good what you’ve got—to make light of what’s fleeting, what one day will leave—why bother with living at all?

According to Michael Meade, “Myths heal us by placing us in proximity of a ‘whole story.’ Not that any one myth tells the whole story, but that a genuine myth has everything it needs within its shape of beginning, middle and end.” Lucidity is myth: our collaborative tapestry, a lifetime contained in a campground. The truth is, for every time I sat in the Pyrobar, swearing I’d clock the next person who said the word “manifest,” came a moment of total tranquility: a child in a garland of feathers, or an hour spent flat on my back with the stars, the hum of a deep set of frequencies lodging themselves in my bones. I’m not above a little Kool-Aid. Viewed from the outside, it’s easy to dismiss festival culture as frivolous and false; and yet, like Meade says, “The same can be said of love.

            “Only those who surrender to love know what love means, how it heals and how it teaches. Myth also requires some surrender and, like love, a little sacrifice.”

            I don’t know about you, but in this, I’ve been saved. I made life in Lucidity, and found peace in my growing pains, too. Nowadays, we sacrifice so much to the linear progress of time; “Yet to find again our mythic sense and touch timeless things, time is exactly what must be sacrificed. Only when time becomes broken can the ‘once upon a time’ realm of genuine imagination appear again.”

I remember the first time I heard about fairies, and felt that belief make a nest in the pit of my heart. Lying in the Lucidity starfield at night, a mess of green laser beams, I was that small girl again.

“Then, creation becomes possible again, and love has a place to enter…”

I may not be a festival person, but I know a good thing when I feel it. And like you, I feel it. I feel it in my bones.

“…and healing can follow.”

            Follow it has, follow it will. Down the rabbit hole, into the Universe, across the plain of a dream only just coming true: it no longer matters to me whether sleeping or waking. I know what has changed in my heart, what pressed up from those grounds. Like most things worth experiencing, until you feel it, you can’t know what you’ve been missing; and like most things worth experiencing, it’s better to know it will vanish by morning than not to have loved it at all. The doing of it is what makes your heart sing: the giving of it, of ourselves, is what makes this sweet festival real.

So you know? If it’s packed in a tarp until next year, if it’s gone when a storm finally hits, so be it. Paint the sign, stick the fence full of flowers; you’ll be better for it, by the time that it washes away. We can love it enough to let go. In the end, we can still pray for rain.   

Nearly Departed

You walk off the stage, taking longer than you should; then again, time is something that never quite occurs to you. It’s early May, the time just before end of school sets in, and the crowd ebbs and flows over us like sand being stirred from above. The sun dips behind a cloud as I shove my fists further into my pockets, feeling around past a melted chapstick and crumpled $5 bill. As you pack your guitar into its case, looking to most like you’re tying your shoes, my feet make a beeline toward you—tugged by an invisible thread over some long plain of silence that breaks open in threes: one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three hold. Suddenly, color gets sucked from the sky. I forget how to be. Late afternoon on a lawn full of teenagers, waiting for one of them to call out your name—or mine—one of us, anyone, just so the other will know what sound to mold our mouths around. I’ll stand in the parking lot afterward, hoping to catch a glimpse of your back as it ducks into a car, something to ground the wave—the almost impossible knowingness—of having already held your face in my hands. “Fauxstalgia,” a friend later calls it; or the feeling of fact, of intense reverie, over an experience you haven’t yet had. What he forgets to mention, however, is the way this truth pounds in the chest. The unfurling that occurs, like a flower that turns toward the sun.

       There are stages to every story.
It was broken down for me, once, like a table of elements: Boy meets girl. (Girl frets about hair, boy hugs girl from behind.) Boy loses girl. (Girl cries into hair, boy stares longingly into faraway ocean.) Boy gets girl. (Girl gets grip.)
Life goes on.
I let this wash over me as I sat with my back against the water, skin crisping in the midday sun like a leaf held under a magnifying glass. Two blonde women approached from the opposite trail, and I knew at least one would feel obligated to stop and tell me, like she was delivering some indispensible truth, that I’d need to wear sunscreen. I’d thank her, smiling so my lazy eye doesn’t crinkle, in that way I always do when I’m still in control. Sure enough, they stopped—matching pink Nikes glaring up from the concrete—and the shorter one leaned in so her breath caught the wind. “Careful,” she said. “You’re really burning up.”
     “Thank you,” I blinked at her, marveling at how many people go out of their way to tell me this. Like my fair skin is a revelation, something that only they see; as though by alerting me, they’ve done their good deed. Like I can’t feel the sting on my face. Like I don’t know my own transparency.
      Meet, lose, get, I wrote again and again, circling the middle word like a fish in a gaping whale mouth. It’s the course of every good sitcom, every meaningful romantic comedy. What’s not lost cannot ever be appreciated. Still, the words oozed like a drone onto the page, and I wondered why my dad said that what’s yours never leaves you: because most things of love do, at some point, evaporate. They were never really yours, he’d argue. Right. But the thing is, I never meant to own them. I only wanted something to fill in the blank for each memory made, or made up, or whatever: to be hit in the heart from the right type of drum, because frequencies cure. Just someone to wait for at a stoplight.


I’m walking with hay sticking out of my sandals, hay pushing in from the toe and up under my arches, dirty with campfire ash and silty mud. High noon, and the late winds of summer play games with my hair; the bare field ahead opens up like a yawn, heat streaming out of its mouth. Sweat drips off the end of my nose, and I’m aware of your presence nearby. I don’t know that it’s you, exactly, or that you’re even here; but if asked, I’d say that my skin is on fire. I swim past the row of vehicles that scream back the cloudless sky, feeling the gaze of children who have not yet un-believed what they sense bursting out of my body. I see you emerge from behind a partition, a full head taller than the boy in the Thin Lizzy shirt, and feel like I’ve swallowed an apple. I can read the hours you’ve spent in the sun from the shape of your skin, like rings in a tree. Your head’s to the left, laughing at something Thin Lizzy has said, and I somehow forget to forget: suddenly, I’m left only with you, with the moment before you turn your head, and the sensation of skin beneath fabric. Thin, like a sheet. A blue dress in early August. I wonder if your smile matches your steps, and it could have been hours. Then again, we both know how heat plays games with the body.

       I put down my pen, coming back to the park and the river; my back against the water, earthy smell pouring out from the trees. Each time someone ran by, my hand snapped to my hip, to the place where my phone wasn’t buzzing—no more than it was five minutes before, and five minutes before that—halfheartedly searching each jogger’s vibration for some sort of message, or truth. I pulled the phone out from my pocket and stared at it, scowling. It stared on, feeling nothing. You pathetic fuck, it said. How did you come to be owned by my face?
Earlier that morning, in front of an online yoga class, I pulled socks over my hands to keep them from slipping. A pupil-less woman in tight pants and ponytail laughed as her leg bent back over her head. “Don’t worry if you fall out,” she told me. “I fall out all the time.” Lies! My calves began their violent shake, and I plopped to my knees. This bitch wasn’t fooling me. “Whew! I know I’m certainly feeling it.” You don’t feel anything, you stupid robot! I pulled myself onto my belly, forehead flat against the tile floor. “Find the place where you’re about to fall over,” she twittered, “and hold it there.”
“Hold.
Hold.
Hold.”

With my head on the floor like that, I thought that I felt my phone buzz.

It hadn’t.


The third time we meet, it is from behind. Your shirt smells like cigarettes, and I know that my window is closing. Before you turn around, I place my hands up to my wooly hat, then move them down over my eyes. This is my face. This is my collarbone, my shoulders, my chest. My stomach, my pelvis, my knees. This is my hand. I am see-through. From your back, I can feel you surrender. My lips on your ear. I lose track of my life and would drive the car, drunkenly, and a dozen more things that refuse to make sense; but somehow, you hear me and smile. Cards drop out of my wallet, and I force myself to notice: to remember that I’ve already eaten dinner, that I don’t really like beer. But certain things wobble and fade when your hand lifts my hair from my neck.


       The breeze came up over the water, exhaling across my notebook with a definitive huff. I traced my fingers along the coarse pages, outlining words, starved for the feeling beneath them. A butterfly drifted by, lazily matching the wind with its attitude, and I wondered if bugs can feel loss. What if it missed its chrysalis? Did anyone ask if it wanted to change?
Clearly dehydrated, still stalking my phone, I pulled myself up from the rock. On my way to the drinking fountain, I remembered a friend who believed she was being followed by butterflies. “My girlfriend died in a traumatic way,” she told me, bopping the pedestrian signal with her thumb as we waited to walk. “And the energy felt clogged. I could feel her around, like she hadn’t crossed over.
“But when I started seeing butterflies, I knew it had happened. She had left. It changed.”
With my head dipped down to the fountain, I thought of my own little ghosts. When somebody’s home is a shrine to a breakup, photos of the recently evanesced looking down from each surface that sticks to her face, eyes following me as I wade through the space left behind. The nights that I drive home from work and a song hits the radio, packed with the outline of someone I’ve tried to forget. My house isn’t haunted, I’m sure…but those stop signs? They’re brutal. I cry for our unfinished business each time that I brake.


This time, our meeting is the sum of three parts: One, a bus with a low overhang. I smack my head as I duck into my seat, and sitting with my knees curled into my chest, spin soft words of comfort inside. Two, a porch and a man eating a turkey sandwich. He offers one bite for a dollar, my eyes drooling over the bread, but I decline. Three, a swarm of people with paper cups in their hands; recognizing a girl from the bus, smiling, then remembering how I’d hit my head. Disappearing, embarrassed.

Body, blood, spirit.

I finally see you from across the room, white hat hovering above a mountain of sweaty curls, and dip my head down to find lipstick. Reemerging, I fold through the crowd, moving forward and to you like an electric current, like a pulse. That familiar draw. You tumble back from me, clutching your heart with your hand; and I know, suddenly, that I’ll fall. I’ll fall even though I designed this room, imagined it with all my heart, picked the wallpaper and dotted the carpet with flowers and placed myself in it, all of me, with a jeweled star in my hair and shoes that stay soft when I walk. When I dance.  

In the alley behind the bar, we look at and through one another, gingerly tossing each word in to see if it sinks. You ask for a lighter, I think you say ladder. You walk away, and a man pushes past. You here alone? He asks. Yes, I reply. Oh, he says, raking his hands through his hair. You don’t look like the kind of girl who comes here alone.

But I did. I come here alone every time, rifling through circumstances, searching. And I remember, when I see you: your cycles, your glue. This is what it feels like to have missed someone for a long, long time.

You return, but your eyes stay focused on the person just behind my left ear. I know that my window is closing again, that glorious in-between granting a moment of touch, and I pull my chin up to your shoulder. A sloppy kiss, then I float away: feet moving aimlessly, knowing only that it’s time to go. I’m sure that you’ll speak, so I stare straight ahead—but suddenly, sense your retreat. It’s strange how the spine recognizes Alone: to contract then relax, sure only that you’ve somehow stopped watching me leave. 2 a.m. on a Sunday, 65 degrees, and I’m not too small to feel pain. What’s terrifying is to think that maybe, at some point, I’ll feel nothing.


I wiped my chin on my sleeve, finally coming up for air, watching the last of the water bubble its way down the drain. Behind me, small notes caught the air as someone noodled their way through a clarinet waltz. I began walking away, but paused when the music halted.
“You writing a book?” a voice asked.
“No,” I replied, turning around. A boy with long, stringy hair stared back at me, clarinet perched on his knee, squinting his eyes in the sun. I cleared my throat. “I’m writing a letter.”
“To someone in prison?”
“No.”
“Oh,” he sniffed, placing the instrument back in its case. “I didn’t realize people did that anymore. Write letters, that is. Other than to people in prison.”
I waited to be released, but stayed mysteriously rooted as this stranger loped toward me. Before long, we sat: tracing patterns in the dirt with our fingers as I spoke to him, and he listened, about the past lives in which I’ve met you before. I don’t know anymore, I squeaked, words jamming in my throat as I tried not to cry. I can’t tell if what I’m remembering is real or made up.
He paused, thumb making a crescent moon shape in the soil, then spoke softly. “Do you know what ‘idiosyncrasies’ are?"
Kind of, I told him. I think so.
“Well, I’m not sure, but I think they’re this thing where you meet someone, and you have the feeling that you’ve met them before; but not only that, you’re remembering how you felt the last time you saw them. Only you’ve never met. But the feeling lingers, like muscle memory…and it’s like you know you’ll love them, because you always have. Because you’ve done it before.”

I remembered you, then, and the blue dress that streamed out behind me. I’ve held you in my muscles for so long, you know; I can’t help that you’ve haunted my bones. Breathe through them like air; let me float in the knowingness, knowing your bones. Sifting through all our lifetimes like sand.

“Anyhow, I’m pretty sure that’s what it means. People were just wrong.”
We sat for a long time, neither one speaking, watching the sun fall behind the water. “What is it?” he asked finally, drawing his hands up into his sleeves.
I want, I told him. And it played like a tape in my heart.

I want, I want, I want, I want, I want. 

      He leapt up, suddenly, wrapping me in his thin arms like a bird. I breathed in his smell as we hugged, but nothing stuck. “I see you,” he said, smiling crookedly as I pulled back. He furrowed his brow. “Are you going to write a book?”
“Yes,” I decided. “Maybe.”
“Well,” he said, brushing off his knees as he stood. “It’s going to be good. Maybe.”

~

I made my way down the hill, past the ducks treading circles in water, past the women in sneakers and babies with soft heads and gums. What happens to all the wishes I’ve hurled toward you? Are they stored until next time, preserved under snow? I think of it, still, when I pick up a dandelion. My mouth makes a wish before I try to explain; and sometimes, it even comes true. Other times, I wash away the small superstitions that tether me to your shape, and I live. Maybe this time around, you will see your own shadow. This time around, maybe one will stop drifting away.

     In the end, though, I’m not worried. We’ve done this before. And if asked, I would do it again.