2010...

I could explain to you what my goals are for 2010 (NOT resolutions - I'm not a "resolution" person either, the logic being that if I want to change my life I can do it any damn time I please and who needs resolutions that I'm just gonna break after five minutes, anyways?) but I thought instead I'd just tell you about a dream I had and you'll all get it anyways. My dreams are so freakin' obvious that a freshman in college who sat in the back row of Psych 101 and doodled while paying half attention would be able to tell you what my dreams mean. Freud would be bored out of his mind.

Anyways, I had the following dream a few weeks ago, (before the thunderstorms hit SoCal) and I'm not making up a single detail, I promise. (Spoiler alert - sorry if some of the images are a little bit graphic. My dreams are very dark and disturbing and bloody.)

I dreamed that I was standing on a wooden float in the middle of the water, like what they had back at the summer camp I used to go in Maine every summer, shivering in the cold in my bathing suit. It was storming, with huge rolling black waves washing over the float and over my feet. The wooden square swayed dangerously with the waves and I, like just about everyone else on the plank, struggled to keep my balance. The sky was dark and angry, lightening cracked every so often and I could make out the shapes of sharks in the water, darting back and forth like large silver and black bullets waiting to strike.

There was someone in charge. He had a whistle and clipboard and he stood on the tiny wooden island with us, telling us that in order to become certified lifeguards we had to jump in the water and save people from the storm and from the sharks. One by one people jumped in.

As it got closer to my turn, I looked down at my legs. They were covered in cuts and blood was running down them, spilling onto my feet and the salty, wet wood beneath me. I kept wiping the blood off from the cuts, hoping that underneath scabs were forming, kept trying to put cloth and band-aids on the wounds after I cleaned them, but my legs kept bleeding. The cuts were not healing. I was not healing. There was just too much that had already happened.

It was finally my turn. The head lifeguard looked at me. I looked at him, terrified out of my mind, blood running down my knees.

I'm sorry, I said. But I'm not going to do this.

The man in charge looked flabbergasted.

I have to learn how to swim first, I said. I have to learn how to swim by myself before I can become a lifeguard.

And what was once a tiny wooden platform out in the middle of the ocean with no other land in sight suddenly connected to land. I walked past the rest of the group of huddled and freezing cold lifeguards-in-training and pulled Benni out of the crowd.

You're coming with me, I said. You don't know how to swim either.

And off we went onto dry land and safer shores. When I looked down at my legs again, there was no sign of the cuts, no blood, no sign of the past. I was clean and new, and I was finally putting my self first.