Dreamed Life:Two

In the beginning, monster dreams come at me in the night.

“Wake up, honey, it’s only a dream,” Momma says.

Only a dream. As if it weren’t real but what’s could be more real than the awful creature who lives under my bed and reaches its long, clammy fingers up the sides of my mattress so I must lie perfectly still in the absolute center as far out of reach as I can get. Hold my breath. It will wrap its long, cold arms around me and carry me away.

This is not the dream I wanted. When I turn on the light it vanishes.

Here is the dream I made for myself: the white, white room. There’s my black Nikon on the floor, the neck loop open, ready for my hand. The beauty of the camera's mechanism, the elegant slap of the mirror lifting and falling exactly so. Like cocking a well-oiled rifle. Frame, focus and squeeze the trigger.

Light on the delicate emulsion. I can almost hear the molecules laughing as they rearrange themselves. What took you so long, they shout joyfully as they form precise shapes on the film. When I pull the photograph out of the fixing solution the image belongs to me. I dreamt I would make pictures and I do. I make beautiful pictues. I exist.

With the camera I can go anywhere in the world. No one asks why I am there because they can see the camera, my trophy tool. Show me your face, I command. Let me count your eyelashes. Now I have you forever.

I still have that two-eyed Kodak Brownie Dad gave me for my twelfth birthday. Two wide rolls of 620 film, twelve exposures each. The Brownie cracks open like a coconut to reveal the spindly spools, the scratched plastic lens, the simple lever that snapped open the shutter. I took pictures of my old hound, left, right, sitting on his haunches, innocently oblivious to his boy stuff jutting forward.

As a girl I never imagined I would become a photographer. Because developing the film cost money, girls grow up to be writers. We sit quietly in a room pecking out words on somebody’s old typewriter. The ‘e’ arm is bent. Write on both sides of the paper to conserve it. Rewinding the thin ribbon, then reversing it. Scrubbing ink off the elite type with a toothbrush dipped in nail polish remover, wet, inky, stinky fingers.

But that Nikon on the floor, the shutter sound as deluxe as a Mercedes door closing with a rich thunk. Those blindingly white domes, palms over rooftops, that journey to Morocco with my aunt Edith. She carries her paint box and small rolls of canvas, a folding easel. She sets up at the gate of a souk where donkeys hurry by. She paints the shadows deep blue and purple. I open the aperture wide to increase the contrast because I want those shadows for myself.

Edith died ten years before I was born but she left me those arched blue and rose shadows and the white, white domes. In my dream I go back alone, find the room, set my camera down and wait for her.