Somewhere Beyond

All at once it was clear that I had no idea where I was or how I got there. Much like how I, in the beginning of my dreams, appear somewhere slowly yet suddenly. I was just there.

“Where am I?” I whispered to no one.

Desperately, I looked around for clues. Medication bottles sat next to me, though who they belonged to was a mystery. Had I taken too many? The news was on the TV in front of me. I didn’t recognize any of the politicians’ names.

Behind me I could hear the coffee machine dripping as it brewed. The smell of it brought me some comfort. I could almost taste it. But had I started to brew it?

I grasped at the soft blanket in my lap and began to twist and wring it as I put together the pieces. I was in someone’s house. But whose? And why?

Who am I anyway?

Turning my attention from the room to the recesses of my mind, I found that I did have some memories. However, they existed somewhere far off and hard to reach. Almost as if the memories were kept on a small boat sailing along the horizon line, and I was left treading water in the open sea.

This realization scared me more than not knowing where I was. I found myself yelling, “Help! Help!”

Two people rushed into the room then and I began to shake ever so slightly. Was it better or worse that I wasn’t wherever I was alone?

There, checking the pills and my pulse and my eyes was a woman. A woman in scrubs. A woman I did not know.

“Who are you?” I asked her, but she was too focused to respond.

On the other side of me was a handsome old man who slowly sat down in a green leather armchair. “You are safe.” He said looking tired as he smiled. “I promise, you are safe.”

I looked at him, hard. I studied his face. I had no idea what his name was, but I knew his face. From where I did not know.

The heaviness I saw in his eyes reminded me that I had seen those eyes cry before. A picture jumped into my mind then of a little boy that I knew I loved very much. A little boy with his eyes and hair color.

When I saw his smile I could remember how it looked on him before the wrinkles made his cheeks soften. It was as if I could hear his deep belly laugh emerging from those lips. As if I could taste those lips.

The calluses on his hands… just seeing them I knew how they would feel underneath my touch as if they were my own. I knew how they looked holding a cup of coffee in the morning, or holding a baby for the first time. I knew they had held me before too.

In the recesses of my mind that I had just opened, I saw many places I knew I had been with him, but I didn’t know why.

A coffee shop with one long bench along one wall. I had worn a red scarf that day.

The top of the Space Needle, so high it’s like we could reach up and pierce the gray clouds. As if we’d cause a rain burst with just our finger tips.

A hospital room, I could still hear the beeping. I could feel the pain in my pelvis.

A church altar. Butterflies were in my stomach.

It sank in then that my ship full of memories was too far for me to ever board again, but maybe I wasn’t treading water after all. Maybe he was my lifeboat. Or maybe he was the anchor; the only force keeping the boat of memories from disappearing to somewhere beyond the horizon.

The song “Beyond the Sea” by Bobby Darin came to mind then, and for whatever reason I could remember every word. I sang a few bars under my breath to comfort myself with the familiar. In that moment, he teared up and smiled in such a way that suggested that that song was significant to him too.

I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know why I knew him.

But when I looked at him, I knew that I was home.