Homeward Bound

I have recurring dreams about my mother.

Dreams in which I race against the clock, against the dawn, for her to live. Dreams in which, during the span of when they’re almost entirely up, I wake up to false news that she has impossibly lived. That she is living.

It always takes me a while in the morning after I wake up to realize they were just that, dreams, wishful thinking imbued with such a strong illusion of hope, that somehow again I have saved her. That she is alive and well.

The other night, my favorite maternal aunt visited me in a dream, but she had shrunk to 3/4 her natural size. She greeted me like a Lilliputian, waving her arms under the arch of a doorway.

I’m homesick so much, I keep hearing the opening chords of “Homeward Bound” by Paul Simon under my breath, in rhythm with my heartbeat. I keep imagining my little dollhouse home back in Illinois with my mother inside, the walk from my elementary school under russet leaves off petrichor stained sidewalks, the air damp and sweet with autumn, the smell of my mother’s cooking emanating and warm in our little kitchen before it was redone.

The scarecrow hanging on the front door. The house smelling of nicotine and meat loaf and red skinned potatoes boiling to be mashed with butter.

In my dreams, she’s always living, but I don’t know the address by the time I wake up.