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The Girl in the Dream, the Girl Who GOT LOST
Where are you coming from?
From the water.
Were you drowning?
I don’t think so. Or maybe I was. But I saved myself. Quack, quack.
Are you me?
I’m not you. Or maybe, alright. I’m a version of you.
Were you drowning?
You already asked that.
What is it like to be drowning?
I am not drowning, I just told you.
Then why did you go quack, quack?
To make you laugh.
I’m not laughing.
Do you remember home?
What home?
Home, where you were born, where you grew up.
How was it? Remind me.
Are you old now?
I’m not sure. It depends on the perspective.
You didn’t like it when you were a child. You always wanted to be old, well, older, this age, this period of your life….
Maybe I didn’t like it then but now I miss it. How was I?
Tell me about myself then. I need you to bring that back to me.
You were a moody child, and you were always missing something.
Was I happy?
You wanted to be.
Did I have friends?
You had one little friend. A tiny little friend.
What do you mean tiny? Was it not a person?
Yes, it was a person, a doll like person. Or a person like doll. You liked to play with your dolls. You talked to them all the time. Sometimes they came to life. And then you were sad again because you didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Maybe sad is not the word. There is only one word for it, but it doesn’t exist in the language you are speaking now.
Where was my mother?
You always clung to your mother. You cried when she left you in school. You cried when she left you in kindergarten. You cried when she left you with the lady who taught French. You cried when she was late from work. She brought you candy. She brought you special candy with cherries inside. You ate the cherry candy and then you cried again. You were always scared of something.
So, I cried a lot. Did I ever drown?
You almost drowned once. But you saved yourself. You swallowed a lot of water. You walked across all of Bucharest carrying your swim stuff. You were six and walked five kilometers across the busy city. She was waiting in line in some agency. She saw you in the window. She was shocked. You knew how much you loved your mother then. You knew how much she loved you and that she would die if something happened to you. That was stupid of you to cross the city on your own.
Was I courageous?
I guess you can call it that. Courageous or careless.
It’s not the same thing.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.
Why do you have to speak in riddles?
It’s not riddles. You are riddles.
Are we speaking a different language?
Different from what?
Different from the language we were speaking when you almost drowned and you walked across the city to where you knew your mother was. Because you knew she was there. The only thing is that if you had been a minute late, she would have left and then what? A minute can make the difference between life and death.
In my dreams I always lose her, or she loses me. But she didn’t lose me that day.
Is it cold where you are?
Yes, it’s cold. It’s foreign, it’s far.
Do you like it?
It’s not about liking it. I chose it and now I have to stick with it.
No, you don’t. You can un-choose it.
How do you un-choose when you have already made all your choices?
You are speaking too abstractly for me. Let’s get back to the drowning day.
It wasn’t just a drowning day. It was also an almost getting lost day. But it was also saving myself from drowning day and not getting lost when I could have gotten lost day. It’s all in the perspective.
Another day she lost me in a Deli store. It was in the times when the stores had food. They were happy times.
See, you had happy times as a child too. How did you lose her?
I said she lost me.
It doesn’t matter who lost who. You were lost from each other.
They were terrifying moments. There was a huge mound of red caviar. I was drowning in the red caviar. I stared at the woman who sold the caviar and then I started crying so hard I couldn’t talk. The woman looked stupid all smeared in caviar. It looked like blood. It could have been blood.
But you found her in the end.
She found me.
Did anybody help you find her?
Maybe, a man who saw me crying asked me about where my mother was. I cried and said I didn’t know. Then she appeared. It’s like I made her appear when I mentioned her.
So, it wasn’t the man who found your mother for you. He just helped you pass the time until you found her. You two found each other one your own.
She was beautiful when she appeared. She was wearing my favorite dress of hers. A taffeta dress with pink and gray roses.
Who has ever heard of gray roses?
The gray roses on her dress were luscious. Where is she now?
She is far, in a big city. In a blues city that she likes. We are all far away from something original. In a faraway country. Everything is faraway now. She is faraway inside a faraway apartment in a faraway city.
It’s good you didn’t drown that day though. And you found your mother. You’ll find her again. She is waiting for you. She is wearing a pretty dress with gray roses. You’ll find each other. You’ll recognize each other. Gray roses are better than red roses. They go with everything. Gray is the new red in this story of you and your mother.
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Domnica Radulescu is a Romanian American writer and playwright that lives, functions and creates in the hyphenated spaces between several cultures and languages. She has published three critically acclaimed novels, Train to Trieste, Black Sea Twilight, Country of Red Azaleas. Train to Trieste was published in thirteen languages and received the 2009 Library of Virginia Best Fiction Award. Two of her plays, Exile Is My Home and The Town with Very Nice People received second prizes from the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award. She is twice a Fulbright scholar and holds a PhD in French and Italian literature from the University of Chicago.