Canyon Lake
THE DREAM
I woke up in a twist of bed sheets and my body felt slick with morning sweat. The skin between my legs and under my breasts felt wet and sticky as if I hadn’t bathed in a week. I laid there wide-eyed and panic-struck trying to focus my eyes and restore my breathing to normal. I looked around the dim, early morning room and realized from my own mussed bed, the house remained quiet with morning stillness. I swung my legs out of the damp sheets and sat up against the cool metal bars of my headboard.
Not the dream again, I said to myself as I pushed my tangled, long hair from my face. I thought by now the nightmares were gone for good. After all, I found what I had been looking for all these years. Damn, I thought, as I slid to the edge of the bed and put my feet on the cool, wood floor. I reached to my bedside table for the wooden pick to coil up my hair away from my neck as the perspiration continued to bead up on my skin. A slight smile came to my lips at the sight of the half-eaten apple leaning against a stale glass of water left over from last night. I looked over my shoulder at the still sleeping form of the man I now shared my bed with. I leaned over gently to put my face against his to smell his warm morning scent of our shared passions from the night before. I watched as his pulse throbbed in the hollow of his throat and I waited for his next exhalation. I lifted my hand toward this place of vulnerability, wanting to lay my fingers on it, to feel his heartbeat echo with mine, but I resisted the temptation to do so but instead, left my fingertips suspended above his steady pulse hoping to calm my own thundering heartbeat.
I looked forward to sharing my life with this man. As I raised my face a few inches from his, breathing in his breath, I tried to convince myself that he was real . . . and mine, now and forever. All those years of searching could finally remain behind me. What unforeseen series of events kept us from finding each other before now. What happenstance careened into motion in this cosmic universe that pulled us together at this time like magnets slamming into each other’s lives like a train wreck. I mused to myself as I moved quietly to the edge of the bed. I sat still so as not to wake him trying to remember what triggered the nightmare that I thought was long gone.
Now I remembered ... as my eyes looked around the dimly lit bedroom. The painting hung on the wall opposite the bed so it was the last thing I looked at before I went to sleep, and the first thing I saw when I woke up. I walked to the wide, wooden slats of the shutters on the window and parted them just enough to let in a small slit of morning light. I moved to stand in front of the painting, still trying to focus my eyes to the adjusting light as it landed with white streaks across the canvas. Even how, as I stand in front of this beautiful scene of Arizona with its craggy mountain face, desert trees and serene-looking water, it draws me back to my childhood. How did he manage to paint it looking so serene, when he knew what happened there years ago. I wondered as an icy shudder quickly spread up the back of my neck.
Yes, that must be it. The painting brought back all those tragic memories of years ago. Maybe now . . . for the last time.
The drowning nightmare revisited me as a result of seeing Canyon Lake again in this beautiful painting. It’s always the same. I am floating down in clear, blue water. It doesn’t become a nightmare until I realize that I can’t reach the surface, some force is holding me down. I keep struggling to ascend because I’m looking at the underside of a boat bobbing on the surface. I keep fighting to free myself and just as I get close enough, a hand reaches down into the water ready to pull me out. Our fingertips barely touch and I am shaken out of the dream, still gasping for breath as I wake in a panic.
“Rae, what’s wrong? Come back to bed. I’m not ready to get up yet,” his still sleepy voice said to me.
I gave a startled jump and tore my eyes away from the canvas. I turned to look into the steel-blue eyes and raven-black hair, with threads of gray running through it, into the face of the man who saved me more than once from my terrors.
“Oh, yes you are.” I said looking at the tent-like shape rising under the crumpled sheets as I crawled back to him from the foot of the bed. I knew that we both found the happiness and peace of mind eluding us for all these years.
After luxuriating in our early morning sexual passions, I retreated to the back patio with my cup of freshly-steeped, hot green tea, while my bed partner slept off his most recent exertion. While I looked out over the morning desert, the aroma of desert fragrances of creosote and dust, took me back to that night in Scottsdale.
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