The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
Enjoying the Flight
7-10-2002

I'm at a busy restaurant--feels like a steakhouse in retrospect--waiting to be seated, when I get a phone call from a Desi chick I went on a single date with some months ago (not in real life, though). My mental image of her is very skinny, unsymmetrical, and crusty. Not someone I feel like talking to. She makes some small talk with me while I head into the bathroom and sit on the toilet. I'm just sitting there, though, like it's a place to sit, and not because I have to go.

Something distracts me and I turn off the phone. I go outside to see Rahul and someone else lounging about. After some talk with them, which I don't recall, I grasp for my phone, but it's not there. I go back to the bathroom and look everywhere. Rahul suggests looking deep inside the toilet, but I don't see anything there, either. Finally I reach into my coat pocket for something else and find it.

I find myself in a little kids' classroom, located in a huge steel building with mazes for hallways and windows in unpredictable places. I go off somewhere, up into some maintenance hallway, and hear a call to return to class. Two other kids converge to the same location as me, looking down a shaft into the classroom. Some steam comes out of it. Two adults walk by the hallway and see us crouching there, and begin to scold us for being somewhere we're not supposed to be. Then a door opens into the hallway and a little kid comes out, dragging a computer on a cart. Another passing adult comments that it's okay, we're part of the Computer Architects or something like that. The little kid starts to laugh his brains out, because he knows that the other three of us are just troublemakers and NOT CAs, but he holds it in, ready to explode at any moment. I get the feeling he only covers for us because he finds it so hilarious.

We get back to class, and I take the cart and push it to my table, opposite my two buds. The tables are like the tables in shop class, except there's nothing holding them up. I start to fill some ambrosia-like substance from the cart into the vise-like mechanism at my seat, but I mess up and it all falls on the floor. The little kid throws a tantrum, yelling about how he covered for me and so on, and goes to tell one of the other teachers, even though there's a teacher's aid right by us. I follow him to make sure he doesn't spill the beans, then return to my seat, where the aid has cleaned up the mess and filled the vise. We assure the little kid that everything's okay, and he doesn't taddle.

I go back into the maze of the building, crawling through tight, angular passageways, ending up in a larger, totally bare room with some other people, supposedly my companions. There's one bad person in there, or at least a bad presence, and it informs us of some mechanism that was triggered in the room that will destroy the room (and us). I don't remember what the mechanism is, but I seem to remember it having to do with heat emnating from the walls, building up enough to trigger some explosion, like gas.

I leave the room by some measure of heroics I don't remember, and take some envelope with me. There's a window I need to get to, but I can only squeeze my arm through a nook and crevice to almost reach it.

I end up outside the building anyway. It's daytime. It was daytime for the entire dream, and the light coming into the windows was always bright. I can see for miles from the top of the monstrous building. Rolling hills, mountains, and forests. I spread my arms and jump, swooping just a bit before soaring through the sky, flying over the landscape. Track 39 from Rockman Dash soars along with me, a piano soundtrack to my flight.

I think about how I'll show this to CJ later, have her fly with me here over the weekend. I swoop extremely close to the ground to get a sense of speed. I see some people passing on the right, by some trees. I try to get their attention, to say hey, look, I'm flying, but they miss me. A bit further down I see two guys floating in the air by a tree, holding golf clubs. I guess it's no big deal that I'm flying then, since other people in this part of the country can, too. I just keep going and going, enjoying the flight.

posted by Phlegm at 11/26/2003