Ooey Gooey, Goozing Oozing Spider

Ooey Gooey, Goozing Oozing Spider

Through a crack in my window screen, tonight a spider comes to me. Sporting pink hair and slipping out of closet doors, this spider is undoubtedly part of the queer community; I will only refer to them using they/them pronouns until further investigation.

The spider and I know each other from a distance—they have never gotten this close. I have grown up playing in my grandmother’s garden, where the spider builds many homes. Their webs stretch all over the strawberry patch, the cucumbers, and the peas. I have learned to look closely before approaching each leaf; I am guilty of walking right into their homes, stepping and sitting, running and skipping right through their webs! This spider is kind, gentle, and forgiving. This is what they sacrifice to exist near a human. They watch me climb the pear tree, sing to the bugs, and cry while pulling out the weeds. They dance to my guitar and I tell them about my dreams.

Every evening after dinner, when the sky turns from pink to blue to black, I slip out the kitchen door and sit shoeless in the grass. I count my fingers from one to ten to check if I am awake. I think of all the things I would do if I discovered I was in a dream. I could shrink my body down to the size of a bug’s and zig-zag through the weeds. I could burrow my head into the dirt and follow the paths of mycelium networks. Oh, how marvelous it would be to see what grows underground, to follow the roots of the pear tree, to meet all the ant colonies. Oh, the places I could go if I were that small!

And if I were to discover my reality as a dream, I could put my hands above my head and jump into the sky. I could perch atop the pear tree and eat the tree clean; I could swallow fifty pears at a time, snap my fingers, and fifty more pears could grow! I could fly for miles alongside the birds and look down upon the world. Oh, how big I would feel, how strong and how high—to move with the wind in the great big sky—to look at the world with a bird’s eye.

Each evening in the garden, I dream about dreaming until I grow sleepy. I say goodnight to the flowers, the mushrooms, and the pear tree. I thank the tree for working so hard to grow food that is so yummy to eat. I turn to my kitchen, tip toe up the stairs and to my bed. I close my eyes and focus on my breath. In two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, hold...out two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, hold...I breath slowly and thoughtfully. I repeat these words: my body is asleep but my mind is awake...

I am in the garden. There are sparkly pink mushrooms and spiderwebs as tall as my father. I check my hands. I count my fingers. One, two, three, four, pickle. My finger is a pickle. My finger is a pickle! I’m dreaming! I’m dreaming! The pear tree’s limbs stretch toward me and wrap around my torso. I eat and eat pear after pear, juicy and sticky and sweet. Suddenly, I am lifted into the sky. The garden is glowing, fantastical, the sky is bright...

As I travel through the garden, my body stays behind. The spider jumps onto my bed to join me in my sleep. As I dream of flying, they stretch their leg into my ear hole and slither down the creek. Crawling past my ear drum, they hear me giggle as I fly above the tree. The spider enters the doorway to my frontal lobe—quite sticky—the pears from my dreams found their way into my brain. Gooey and ooey, oozing and goozing through the door crack, the spider crawls underneath, and comes out sweet.