I took more than I should have but the effects were quiet and sublime. I wandered away from the party and all the stimuli and crumpled onto something like a beanbag, only bigger. It was sitting on the corner of a platform with some hanging tapestries, strung from rods, to give the effect of an outdoor room. Ten minutes later I was half asleep, awash in imagery, hallucinations so tactile they transported. One tapestry, in particular, tickling my left shoulder and the wind inspired it to sway slowly, back and forth took, took form in my mind. That beanbag, an embrace, the tickle, my grandmothers hand, stroking my brow, during a particularly heinous fever, long time ago.
These things. These dreams. Time melts away and for a moment we are allowed insight into something far more precious than memories. A reminder of how it felt, a long time ago, before experience and cynicism and variation informed our emotions. Before we walked away or turned it off or changed our tune. How it was when all it took was this one woman's hand, on my brow, to make a fever's hand loosen it's grip, to make the pain rear it's head in fear, scamper to a lesser part of my consciousness.
And that woman. My grandmother, next door, bustling around, making bland and fatty foods, dressed in a housecoat and a full face of makeup every day, bringing plates of food to my grandfather, reclined in his easy chair, watching "Days of our Lives". She would teach me to play all sort of card games, and listen to my ridiculous explanations and both of them would listen to me sing songs far too adult for my young voice.
That adoration. It can't exist in daily life. Certainly not in adult life. My parents had to clean my clothes and feed me real food and deal with my attitude. They had to love me as I was and who I might turn out to be. Those people next door seemed to embrace it all with much more forgiving simplicity. The pure part of love that wants only to see the object of their affections express pleasure.
I can't believe how much I miss her when I think of her like that. I can't believe how little I thought to miss her at other times still in the land of the living. Context is a fickle bitch, sometimes. Still, some memories live on in the tactile realm when logic has long relegated them to whispers and perverted their significance with more pressing matters of lust and money and comfort and the future, hollering it's insistent reminders. A beanbag becomes the woman who loved you more than the stars and a tattered tapestry all that is soothing in the world.