Sunday Dreams

Sometimes I imagine myself dancing. In my head, I'm much better at it. I mean I have fun when I actually dance, pure fun, and I don't hold back and if I look funny I laugh. I think it's an essential part of life, the occasional release of a body from the body-shaped box made from everyday things that it's kept in. Everyday things like restaurants or gas stations, because we don't dance there, or in line-ups, or while on the phone with our employers. But in my head, where there is a gorgeous and impossible freedom, I choreograph and star in entire productions. I am not limited by energy, strength, flexibility, time, location, passers by, or anything else. I am an Amazon. And that goes for everything I do in my head. I frequently hop fences and run through dusty wheat fields in the last hour of sunlight with twenty or so friends and family members and all of us are so fast, and none of us have debilitating knee pain. But in real life, as it's called, I'm just riding a bus.

I work as a bartender. I've done this before, it's a thing I do for money and because I genuinely like people. It's less than thrilling, but I have rent to pay, and debts, and decisions that are taking longer and longer to make. Here is a snapshot: I'm using a fork to sift out the lumps in the celery salt. There's more where that came from. My shifts are generally the least busy ones; weekdays, Tuesday nights. I clean things, and happily volunteer as a guinea pig for the

equally unoccupied cook who experiments with new menu items. Think mashed potatoes made with ranch dressing then grilled on a flat top to make little potato pancakes. If you have occasion to try this, do.

And, as ever, I keep my mind occupied. I try to picture myself with a career. Sometimes I imagine being a flight attendant, with a crisp, clean uniform and perfect hair, always smiling, speaking French, and coming home with pictures from various glamourous places every week or so. Last Tuesday I left the front door of the restaurant unlocked. We closed early, around midnight by the time the stragglers trickled out. The room was swept, chairs put up, bar shut down, lights off. I set the alarm and locked the back door behind me, forgetting entirely to check the front. It is a miracle that no passing thief discovered my mistake.

I came to work Wednesday morning to discover this alongside my boss, and cried a little while I was mopping. I never enjoy this. In my head I am not a crier, and when faced with my own failures or other challenges, I am steely and rational, rolling up my sleeves, saying and doing only what must be said and done. But the little body-shaped box I live in insists on the absurdity of opening the flood gates in my eyes and reducing my hands to useless, quivering pincers at the first sign of trouble. Such is life. Or real life, as it's called.

So, I spent Wednesday morning roaming the Scottish hills. In my head, I am this indulgent, yes. I imagined myself wearing wooly sweaters and gumboots, rosy-cheeked and dewy from the fog and when that grew tiresome I got myself an apartment in Italy, and leaning out my window with the sun in my hair I could smell fish cooking in the cafe downstairs. On the ride home I was Peggy Lee in a dark nightclub singing 'Black Coffee'.  

Well fuck, I don’t want to imagine myself sifting salt.

I wonder if you know of this feeling, that of half-lives, daydreams, and the maudlin, flickering halt they come to when the bus lurches.

I'm hanging out on Monday

My Sunday dreams to dry