Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Love, Dream, Scrabble

I have this thing of taking a scrabble letter holder and placing it on my desk.

Whatever it is that I want to draw into my life, I find the correct letter tiles to spell it out and keep it in front of me as I work and do my homework, write creatively etc.

I finally removed the last tiles which sat upon the holder after they had lived there for a long period of time, and had allowed just one to remain, planning on building up to assembling the word I now had in mind, making sure that I really wanted it.

This is a shift, as normally I decide that I want something and I pounce on it with every ounce that I’ve got in me. This whole concept of something gradual is not natural and rather foreign to me. But it felt nice none the less. All of it. The word I was building up felt nice. The idea. The waiting.

A change occurred, and last night, as soon as I fell asleep in the moments just following my head hitting the pillow, I dreamed about those letters. My hands were submersed in a deep tub of scrabble tiles. I felt their silky smoothness, their cool temperature; heard the deep rumbling sound that they made as I moved my hands through them in circles, causing them to scrub against the deep container in which they sat. Eventually I brought my hands from the depths of the tubs and to the surface, fingering and picking through the letters, a clickity ticking sound as they fell upon one another in that superficial upper layer.

It didn’t feel natural. It didn’t feel good. A superficial surface-skimming just didn’t seem adequate for anything I’d like to draw into my life.

And I’m not really sure what it all means, besides that ultimately I am searching for something and it feels better to search deeper within than to only touch the surface of a dream; but I spent the extra time taking handfuls of tiles from the middle of the bin rather than from the top, slowly acquiring the letters for my word.

In reality, my tile holder remains with only one letter tile on my desk. Within the day, the current tile will probably no longer be there, and instead, four letters will take its place. “L”, “O”, “V”, “E”. Because after two years away from it, I just want to jump into the open seas of those letters and get carried away in its current. And not worry about finding my way back to the solid land I came from.

No comments: