In Our DreamsCamden Rose
2800 words I saw James first, across the terminal, holding the duffel bag like he was about to run. He looked older than in our dreams, gray hair peeking out of a receding hairline, wrinkles carving into his forehead. Not that I blamed him for changing the little things. I made changes too—my hair shimmered and my stomach became flat when we met in our dreams. It was far too tempting to make a better version, to act like we were better even if nothing was really different. But everything was different. The world was dying and he’d returned. His eyes met mine and just like that, he ran. I ran too, closer and closer, until we were in each other’s arms. He was so warm. That was something that never felt right in the dreams—the warmth. You could feel things pressed against you, but the temperature was never there. It was a reminder that everything in the dreams wasn’t real. We kissed, right there, in the middle of the terminal, even though people stared. When he had left, we both thought he’d only work there for six years, but then his contract was doubled and he had to stay. It had been twelve years since we’d seen each other in person. Twelve years of him exploring and me staying put. Twelve years of me working at Neovision to pay the bills while he helped the National Organization of Space Terraforming (NOST) save humanity. Twelve years of visiting only in dreams. We craved each other painfully. “Love,” he said. The sound vibrated through my chest. I suddenly didn’t care about his graying hair or my dull curls. He was here, in my arms. I was here, in his arms. In his warmth. “Lovely,” I responded, just like every other time. *** I watched his face when we entered our house. Not much had changed—I wanted it to feel like home—but it had been twelve years. I had solar panels installed on the roof, and the walls repainted to stop the stains. I’d moved our shoes, and our books, and our kitchen plates, small shifts in the sands of an hourglass. I’m sure even if I tried to reset it all to how it was, I wouldn’t be able to. He would understand. He hung his coat up on the rack, just like he always used to do, and sighed. I pulled him close, embraced his warmth. “It’s nice to be home,” he said, leaning into me. “I’m glad you’re back.” We stayed like this for a few minutes, swaying in each other’s arms in the foyer. If he noticed how the mirror now hung where it hadn’t ten years ago, or how the shoe rack had been replaced a few years back because it broke, he didn’t comment on it. After a while, I let go. It would take some getting used to. It was strange, suffocating in a way, having him here, in my space. Our space. He didn’t seem to notice the way I pulled away from him. He was staring at the light above us. “Has it always been this bright?” I glanced at the fixture, then back at him. I had changed the light bulb recently, and it was harsher than before—an LED. Better for the environment. He walked into the kitchen, then the dining room, then the bathroom. I trailed behind him. His hand grazed objects, relics of our life together. A picture from the time we visited the Space Needle, before it was repurposed into rocket parts for another NOST mission. A dried leaf from our hike up Mt. Orion. The crappy wood desk we’d bought together when we first got the place. I was surprised the thing had survived that long, honestly. He finished in the bedroom—our bedroom—where I’d added extra pillows because I knew he liked sleeping with one on each side. Next to my nightstand pulsed the faint blue light of the DSD, tall and arching over my bed with nodes hanging down, almost like a jellyfish reaching for the sheets. “I had to get a second-hand one,” I said, explaining, then I laughed. Of course, he knew that. I’d told him that when I first got the device, when I first visited him a year after he’d left. We’d had this conversation in our dreams. “Technology is so different here,” he whispered. “What was it like…?” I probed, but he only shook his head. I’d seen a little bit in dreams, little bits of his planet sneaking through, but it only made me more curious about what was going on that the press wasn’t covering. I bit my lip. There would be time for us to discuss everything when he’d been back for a while and we’d settled into our routines. We got ready for bed in silence. I kept glancing at the DSD, wanting to put the nodes on my head like I’d done every night since I got the machine. It had become a habit over the years, as unconscious as checking my work email for payroll tasks. To afford the machine, even secondhand, I’d needed to take on extra work, and the habit never broke. I took my hand away from the power switch. He was here. I didn’t need a device to reach him. He was here, with me. I curled into his warmth. *** “I was thinking we could go to Mount Orion today,” he said over coffee the next morning. I’d had to dig out the pot from where it was hidden in the cabinet and go to the store for some beans. “Maybe,” I said. I didn’t really want to go to the mountain, not now, not with him. The last time he’d seen it was months ago in our dreams. And then, I’d let him take over the subconscious construction. “You seem hesitant.” “I’m not hesitant. I’m just not sure if that’s… Is that really how you want to spend your first day back?” I knew it was inevitable that he’d want to see some of the world he’d left, but I’d thought I’d have a few days to prep him. I put my cup down and wrapped my arms around the back of his chair. “Don’t you want to spend it with me?” He tilted his head up. “But I saw—see you every day. I haven’t seen Earth in over a decade.” He smiled and it was decided. We were going. *** We set off right after breakfast. I drove. His license had expired a few years back and, being on another planet, he didn’t get a chance to renew it. I hoped that as we made it closer and closer, he’d realize the devastation seeping in and ask to turn around and go home before he saw much more. Instead, he held his head to the window like a child, taking everything in and seemingly not noticing how many fewer trees there were. When zoning regulations changed and construction began felling trees in the Orion National Park, I wanted to show him in our dreams, but we were happy and I needed that to keep going. And by the time the fires wrecked the upper east side of the state, I was working long hours at Neovision due to massive layoffs and didn’t want another argument. At some point, it became harder to tell him than to keep the secret. I think he knew at some level that the Earth was dying and I was working for one of the companies in charge of its collapse. But in the dreams, when I was feeding him what could have been, he was able to ignore it. “It’s crazy how much can change,” he said, eyes darting back and forth over the landscape. “Yeah.” I gripped the steering wheel tightly as we turned into the park. Just last year, Neovision was involved in a big fracking scandal in the area, which polluted the waterways nearby. Many people left, but I needed the money and the consistency and the flexible hours to visit James. We got out of the car and stood on the edge of the parking lot, or what was left of it. Since the marmots left, the ecosystem of the mountain had shifted. Plants died, birds flew away, even the little critters like bugs and worms were nowhere to be seen. And then the city gave up on keeping the land safe, and the parking lots started to crumble as well. With nowhere to park, less people came, and less people cared about saving the mountain. There were other mountains. Other places to explore, trash, burn, and leave. As the overwhelming silence surrounded us, I leaned into him. He held me close, processed. Sometimes, when I looked at all this devastation, I wondered if everyone was right: I was to blame because I’d stayed working for Neovision even though I knew they were polluting the Earth. I could have chosen to work for a better company but didn’t. I could have chosen to go on the job hunt; people would understand and hire me quickly. I could have taken the risk. Except I couldn’t. I couldn’t afford to leave what was so stable. James’s body movements weren’t the same as they were in my dreams. My desire was subtler, slower, and crept across me like a drought-caked stream. In dreams, it exploded across my body. Made me want him even more. But here, it made me feel… broken. We started hiking down the trail. On first glance, someone might just think the wilderness looked like this because it was winter, that the trees were bare because of frost and cold weather. Truth was, we hadn’t had cold weather in almost a year now—at least not so cold that snow landed on the ground. Our water supply was low and started being rationed about 6 months ago. I knew James noticed. I knew he saw the way everything around us was dead. I knew he felt the shift in the air, the warmth that should never exist on a mountain this high. But he didn’t say anything. Once we got to the top, we stared out at the view—at the true reach of global warming—and he put his hand in mine. “I can’t believe that after… after 12 years, we haven’t changed,” he said. I wanted to say we had, but that wasn’t true. So instead, I focused on a stray leaf dancing in the wind. The only leaf on the tree in front of us. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He faced me, voice laced with concern. “Because…” Because I wanted time with you, not time talking about the world. Because I wasn’t ready to discuss how I was still working for Neovision. Because I wanted to see you happy in our dreams, not thinking about how the world you’d return to wasn’t the same. “Because I didn’t want to hurt you.” He waved his hand around at the broken view. “You didn’t tell me, because you didn’t want to hurt me? If I’d known then I could have… I could have come back. I could have helped us rebuild. But now it’s too late and—” “You could have come back?” He’d told me that the 6 years and the 6 years after were non-negotiable. That NOST required he stay. “Well, you know what I mean.” He rubbed the back of his neck and stared out at the devastating landscape. “How long?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, as though I hadn’t been wondering about him lying about needing to stay ever since he got his own DSD. “Hmm?” “How long could you have chosen to come back?” He stared at the dirt beneath our feet. “I don’t know… like 6 years or so.” “I can’t believe it.” I turned back down the trail, gaining speed. The dirt threatened to make me slip, so I went faster. “You lied about the contract being extended.” He ran after me. “I wanted to come back, but the planet—they needed me.” “I needed you, too.” “But you saw me in dreams every night. We were okay.” He said the second part as though he were trying to convince himself. “You’re right. We were okay,” I lied. I turned to face him. “I was selling my soul to Neovision every fucking day, waking up and letting them pull oil out of the ground, doing their payroll so they could pull oil out of the ground, not saying anything while they pulled oil out of the ground so that we could be okay. I…” I rubbed my face, trying to force the youth back into it. “I gave up so much for you and you left.” “I left to help save the Earth.” It sounded like a plea. I waved my hands around at the barren trees, the drying landscape, the lack of birds. “Well, did you do it? Did you save it? Cause it feels like you just decided the Earth wasn’t worth saving and left on the first craft that would give you a chance on a new world.” James sighed. I knew the sigh from twelve years ago. It was the one he gave when he finally decided it was time to argue back. I braced. “But you stayed. So, why didn’t you try?” “What?” “You were working for them.” He spat the word as he said it. “You were helping them continue doing what they were doing. And even if you weren’t, you were still driving your car, using gas, getting groceries at the store even though you didn’t know where the food came from.” “I can’t live off the grid, James. It just isn’t possible. I had to break a little of the Earth just to live.” “No,” James said. “You chose to do this.” I stopped and caught my breath. I hadn’t realized until that moment just how much he’d changed. How much he didn’t remember about the compromises we had to make just to be. Hell, even getting flowers had an ecological footprint. But he’d been gone for too long. He’d been in a world where he could track his every move without having to think about what companies had their hand in the pot. He’d been somewhere where each step was intentional, and didn’t have unknown ramifications hidden in the price. I’d installed solar panels, but the construction gear to install them used fossil fuels. The materials in the panels had microplastics. I’d repainted our walls to remove the stains, but the paint buckets were shipped from across the globe. The brushes were made of plastic. I’d driven my car to go on a hike with him, but the gas used oil. The car parts were noncompostable. I’d gotten beans from the store, but they were from a continent away, shipped here with cheap gas that was worse for the environment. It was impossible. I didn’t have a choice. *** We spent the next few days in silence, as the weight of our words settled. I continued to make him coffee with the beans from across the world. He continued to act like he had a choice in all this. And at some point, he signed up for another mission with NOST. *** I held his hand as we walked to the airport, where he’d fly to the take-off zone. Even if we were both still upset, we craved touch, warmth, from each other. As the security line shrank, we hugged. “I’m sorry,” he said into my hair, into my flat curls. “I hope you get to make the change you want to,” I responded. I wasn’t ready to forgive him. But I did want to hold him close, to feel his skin on mine. He nodded against my neck and pulled away. “Maybe, I’ll see you in our dreams, love?” he said, a hopeful smile tugging at his lips. He picked up his duffel bag. “Maybe.” I caught my voice before I added lovely. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. And then, he left. Once he disappeared from sight, I returned to my car, drove home, and planted a flower in my garden. The dirt dug under my fingernails and my knees ached when I finally stood up. But when I stepped back, I saw the petals arching toward the cloud-covered sun. It might be a dream, but I had to hope it would help nourish the ground around it. It would provide food for bugs and pollen for bees. It would return small amounts of oxygen to the atmosphere. It was the little things we could change. |
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Camden Rose
Camden Rose is a queer author who loves seeking out magic beneath the everyday world. Her works have appeared with Inner Worlds and Heartlines Spec. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her spouse, black cats, and collection of books and board games. You can find her online at www.camdenscorner.com.
Read more from Camden Rose:
- "Bert" - Baubles From Bones: Issue 1
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