By Marina Vladova
I had a dream the end was coming and so did you and everyone else and we started packing but my laundry was dirty. Don’t let your dirty laundry pile up in case you have to quickly pack to leave your planet. In my dream, everyone else had a similar dream. That’s how we knew the end was real and that we had to pack. Your friends dreamt it, your enemies alike. People from your past you haven’t talked to in decades called you, dropped in on you even when you were on the toilet with the door open, because who had time for privacy when it was time to talk with everyone, and plan, and pack. There was my daughter—six again while I was on the toilet, just like I was when she was six. I wanted to gaze at her, not go anywhere. They asked me where my CDs were. What for? Music, to carry music where we go. My old friend was there—twenty-seven again. I wanted to linger with him and remembered how he would want this—to be twenty-seven, that is. We landed on a planet. There was no record of where we had been, what we had done, that it wasn’t our planet to begin with. Although there was always already a feeling. And writers kept writing about stranger and stranger heroes. Until the dream came again. And everyone had it. That’s how we knew we had to pack, knew we had to leave. And we searched for another and another like Goldilocks shuffling through linens for comfort. But nothing, for its own sake, would ever be ours. Only the longing to replicate, to build back. So we wandered and ventured making up philosophies for failures—that searching for meaning in spaces devoid of meaning is some kind of shared experience? Like the human condition is normal? In my dream, we continue having a similar dream each time the wreckage is near. And then we know it’s time to leave again, to board the vessels strung like an oily toad flotilla moving through a dry gully. Make sure your dirty laundry doesn’t pile up, and you have CDs to play. I wake up to ask my partner if he, too, had the dream. He says he didn’t. He says I’m thinking about it because our dog is dying. Says he had a dream that he was about to give a lecture and his finger was bleeding. He checks the pillow. He looks at his finger. He says, “our old friends from Buncombe County were there”. Signs of the apocalypse: dreaming of old friends in their youth who come down from the mountain to see you, that doors don’t work and privacy is unfulfilling, a mound of old clothes grows with no time to linger or gaze at who you love. And your dog is dying. And you fall asleep wimpishly to the fermata of his prolonged breath.
Marina Vladova was born in Odesa, Ukraine and grew up in Ohio where she taught high school English. She finds herself thinking about gooseberries and writing about resettlement and migratory loss. Her work as a narrative medicine interventionist integrates poetry & storytelling into clinical settings. She also teaches a humanities capstone at a Northeast Ohio medical school. Marina has lived in Washington, D.C., New York, London, and Portland, and her work has appeared in Interview, Surface, Big Magazine, and Muse. Marina holds an M.Ed and an MPH, and this fall she’ll teach an MFA internship course called, The Stories We Tell: Creative Writing in the Sphere of Public Health as part of NEOMFA (the Northeast Ohio MFA consortium).
