time and dreams, unmoved

I'm still getting myself writing, but one way I'm keeping myself motivated is by going through older pieces, bits of which make me feel this is worth doing. This is from September 4, 2008.
I dreamed last night. I need no seer or psychologist to decode it all, to trace the shadows to their source.

I can't remember how it started, except that it started with death. I'm driving, and someone's in the car with me. We see something, and it shakes us up. It's horrific, and we drive away, trying to get away from it.

We drive on. There's a fog over the grass in the fields, surrounding and seeping into the cracks and seams of old white-framed houses. There's a wide divider between our lane and the next. Across the road, to our left, a massive white swan is trying to take flight, but its neck and back are partially broken, the graceful length tortured, twisting on itself. With great struggle, it leaves the ground, trying to keep hold of what it is, but it can't get more than a few feet up, and it crashes to the asphalt again.

We're moving too fast, and I can feel a momentum in my heart, mostly helplessness, but a twinge of that is self-imposed, like there's nothing we can do to help, because maybe we won't. It's too hard, too much effort. But despite the doubt of our willingness to try, we know we can't help, we can't get back, can't fight the momentum, no matter how much we want to.

I turn back to the road ahead, the flatbed truck ahead of us swerves to the left, there's a crunch and then I see the girl, about eight or nine, standing in the road, her bike behind her, her brother's body tangled with his bike on the street in front of her. She cradles his head awkwardly, and doesn't stop screaming.

We stop this time, get out and start running to the girl. Whoever I'm with grabs the girl. People are running out of the house nearby. The woman isn't reacting enough to be the girl's mother. I'm reaching for the phone to call for help, and I wake up.

1:00am. I'm shaken, a little frightened by the force of it all, that I can still feel on me and inside of me. I think of calling someone, but I don't. The cat is bundled up extra tightly against my leg, like he knows, and is applying comforting pressure to some wound.

I pet him and fall back asleep.

I dream again. I'm in an apartment, just down the parking lot from mine. It's the apartment where yesterday, in the waking world, my neighbor's body was found.

Here, I walk in as several people are cleaning out the apartment. The living room is empty of the larger furniture, and now it's just the small stuff, the flotsam and jetsam of her life, the same as in all our lives, those things that are left unboxed and scattered across the floor in those final moments of moving out of a home, things to keep, but without a real place.

I see a litterbox, and there's a cat on the windowsill, already looking lost. I pet it a bit, tell it things will be OK.

No one there knows anything about her, though I sense that one of them is a friend, maybe a brother.

There's just a helplessness again. Though we didn't know her, we know what a life is. Though she's already gone, the moment she left hangs around us like a fog, something we can almost touch, and if we can touch it, maybe we can go back, maybe we can change it.

But time moves, and I'm moving towards waking again. The people in the room fall silent, and I know we all feel that momentum in our hearts, moving us past that moment, that sight of the falling swan, that point at which we can't turn back.