Don't Be Gone Long, Ellen.: Driver 8's Wearing My Harborcoat.
I dreamed of flight. When you’re fifteen, you can have dreams like that. You dream of spreading your arms and sailing over everything you’ve known. These are not labeled as fantasy by your mind, no grand illusion to separate the waking life from everything slumber creates; what you see when your eyes close at midnight is as tangible as anything you reach out and touch with your eyes wide open at noon. School is a temporary affliction. Pretty soon everything you dream about is going to be real.
It could happen tomorrow.
The radio stayed on as I drifted off to sleep, the signals bouncing over Manhattan Island, connecting eight and a half million people in a symphony. The music played through the air to everyone. The music played just for me. I spent Ninety-Seven, Ninety-Eight, Ninety-Nine in a nighttime haze of pop, spinning the dial from PLJ to HTZ to NSR and back, trying to find the song that would drive my imagination. I would fall asleep to a heady mix of contemporary music, letting them bleed over my mind into one indistinguishable noise, a pleasant enough background to the images which would last far longer.
R.E.M. cut through it all. They burned. They became the one band who became as inseparable from the dreams of those years as the images themselves. When I dreamed that my feet had left the ground I saw them lift as clear as day. I felt the heat of a stifling Virginia summer, even if I was three months and hundreds of miles away. I could see my friend Speedster beside me, confident that she would tell everyone what was happening, knowing that she realized as well as I did that impossible things called miracles were going to occur every single day, because we were young and we believed. And through it all I heard Life’s Rich Pageant and Green and New Adventures in Hi-Fi, records played piecemeal over radio waves and then on a Walkman I kept near me everywhere. These tunes caused me to dream bigger. My mind cemented dreams with them that were strong enough to outlast years and sorrow and the inevitable move to adulthood. The memories I have of high school are big enough to remember lessons, heartbreaks, dumb nights drinking and dumber nights not drinking. They’re big enough to recall conquering gravity. I broke the bounds of pavement and skyscrapers to travel where no one else could. This was truth, and sometimes more important than anything that happened in daylight. I carried these lessons with me.
“Stand.” I am dancing in a June thunderstorm, letting the water cleanse me and remind me that there are times to celebrate. “The Great Beyond.” I am flying. It’s real. I swear. “Imitation of Life.” I am going to survive reality. “Leaving New York.” And I am going to come back. “Pop Song 89.” I am here and living and dreaming, and sometimes I blend the two to keep my story moving forward.
In a drawer in my childhood bedroom there sits a notebook with all the things I dreamed. I don’t remember what it says. I know exactly what it sounds like. And today I’ll play those same songs, and I’ll wonder if I can dream like a kid does. I wonder if there’s still time to fly.
