Today’s episode is guest hosted by Leslie Sainz.

Transcript

I’m Leslie Sainz, and this is The Slowdown.

If I were to take my dreams at face-value, to interpret them literally with no regard for symbolism or the way mitigating factors like stress, insomnia, or even diet contribute to my imaginative subconscious, I would believe that I have never, not once, moved on from any of my past relationships. In the last year, my sleeping mind has begun constructing the most visceral, inane occasions in which I am cast opposite all my casual flings and ex-lovers alike, their silhouettes somehow sharper and more blurred than my waking mind can even recall. They hover, as phantoms like to do. But I think of them more like pop-up targets in an arcade shooter: stiff and obstructive, threatening, and mostly, indistinguishable. Figures designed to increase the heart rate.

Part of me is inclined to blame this phenomenon on the cosmos, the way the sky looked at the moment of my birth (if you’re curious, my sun is in Gemini, as is my Venus). Another part of me suspects that I’m simply a glutton for words of affirmation. Maybe these aren’t so mutually exclusive. Either way, these dreams, which occur at least once a week, follow the same script: the surprise of encountering the ex-lover, then, their apology, then, their confession of unwavering devotion for me.

Take this dream: I am trapped in an abandoned indoor shopping mall with a highschool crush. His tongue is wetter than I remember and neither of us enjoy the soft pretzels, long stale. Eventually, my crush confesses that a handful of entries in the Xanga blog, which he maintained in the early 2000s in place of a physical diary, were about me. My dream self, of course, already knew this.

Though I’m neither amused nor affirmed, when he professes his regret for mishandling my blistering teenage feelings, I experience something like relief. Light pulses through the giant skylight, eerily illuminating a trackless kiddie train ride, which seems to have just materialized. He tells me I’m gorgeous like light. He uses the word “love” repeatedly and I say nothing, especially not the word “love.” And then, the inevitable falling action. My waking-self steps into the director’s chair and pans out the dream-camera to reveal the absence of all figures. The abandoned mall is empty once again. I’m startled awake and groggy and hot.

With all of these past flames showing up in my dreams, I’ve been trying to untangle our connections in the now. Today’s nimble poem inspires me to think about rope idioms in the context of romantic relationships. When did you show your lover the ropes? Have you given your lover enough rope from which to dangle?

A Book of Music
by Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is 
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries 
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death. 
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

“A Book of Music” by Jack Spicer from MY VOCABULARY DID THIS TO ME © 2010 Jack Spicer. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press.