What we do on the other side…
You get those dreams?
What dreams?
The ones where you’re dying.
Yeah. Everyone gets those.
I guess. I’ve been getting them.
So?
So, I’ve never really gotten them before.
That’s weird.
Yeah. I’ve asked a couple people the same question.
And?
Pretty much they all say the same thing you said.
That everyone gets them?
Yeah.
Told you.
…
…
…
So…I feel like there’s part of this you’re not telling me.
I don’t know. I guess it just freaks me out.
Because you never get them?
Not that so much.
Then what?
Just that, I don’t know, in these dreams I die. Willingly. And when I wake up I feel like I’m actually dead.
That’s doesn’t seem right.
I know. Worst part is that there’s been a couple times I remember waking up and then…
And then what?
And then falling back asleep, back into the death. I can feel it, like my mind is slipping into a void. I can feel the blood rush to my head, and then it disappears. Then I finally wake up and I can’t go back to sleep. I’m afraid to go back to sleep.
That’s fucked up.
I know. It’s nuts.
You stressed or something? Like, in regularly during the day?
Not particularly, I guess.
So, then you have like a death wish or something?
I don’t know. I think I’m just curious.
About dying?
Yeah, I think so.
That’s really fucked up.
Yeah, I know.
Spaceships, you think. Spaceships. The first, in your eyes, meaningful thought to come into that head of yours. Spaceships. Not spaceships in the sense that the Millennium Falcon is a spaceship. No matter how much you may desire it to be, the Falcon is not a real thing, not something you could fly at least. But spaceships in the sense that the Space Shuttle Endeavor is a spaceship, something actually capable of taking a human being into the outer reaches of the atmosphere and into the frigid emptiness of the universe. You wanted to be an astronaut since you were a kid, one of the few enduring notions you have managed to keep with you all these years, a kid sitting in the back of Mrs. Wilson’s first grade class at Val Verde Elementary. It was in that classroom, larger than any classroom you would every sit in until you would begin your college career, something that can be described as “lackluster”, but it was in her classroom that you first sat down and looked up towards the ceiling where Mrs. Wilson pinned several, mural-like posters, just below where the far wall met the top of the building, and you noticed the one of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and the rocky, newsprint surface of the moon where the Apollo Lunar Module rested. You sat there at your desk, staring up at the reproduction of the moon landing, ignoring the one next to it, a picture of the food pyramid, or the one demonstrating how rain becomes water becomes clouds becomes rain becomes floods. None of that interested you, none of it, as far as you were concerned, meant a single thing to you, nothing except for the two astronauts up on that wall, floating across the shimmering gray hunk of rock hanging in the blackness of space. That was you. That was where you wanted to be, a boy amongst the stars.
