I had a sort of revelation last night.
I was sitting right here, at the computer, trying to put together a mix-tape using Napster-files to figure out what sounded good next to what. (It's a lot easier than trying to manipulate my CD-player into doing that...) I was playing... I can't even remember what I was playing. Maybe it was Duran Duran, maybe Sarah McLachlan... Whatever. I suppose that part is unimportant, although the song was beautiful, whatever it was.
...So beautiful, in fact, that the hair on my arms was standing up and I closed my eyes to let the song take me off to some distant place in the clouds or something...
And as I closed my eyes, I had... a vision... sort of... Not a vision, exactly, but sharp déjà vu. Suddenly, I was a little girl, maybe three or four years old. I was taking a walk with my daddy in the woods. We lived in a little white house in a neighborhood that was primarily old Polish people, and just a quarter of a mile away (across the highway, so I'd never been there before) was a mountain. Well... a large hill. And one day, my daddy took me over to that mountain and we walked through the trees together. Some of the time, he carried me on his shoulders, and some of the time he let me down to play. And I remember about ten seconds of that day with such clarity, you'd think it happened yesterday. I was picking bluettes: those little tiny shitty four-petalled blue flowers? I was picking them in a patch of sunlight on the forest floor. My daddy was just ahead of me, kind of anxious, waiting for me to stand the hell up and keep walking. He didn't understand about the bluettes, that I wasn't in any rush to get anywhere or see anything... I just wanted to pick a handful of them. It was perfect. It was the perfect moment. I don't remember any of the rest of that day.
I remembered all of this perfectly as I was listening to the song. And then, suddenly, the déjà vu faded into... well, maybe it WAS a vision of sorts. I was still there, in that forest, in that patch of sunlight... Only, I was standing up, and I was watching a different little girl kneeling in the dirt picking flowers. She was wearing a little white dress, and she had black hair. I knew immediately it wasn't some strange incarnation of myself; it didn't FEEL like I was watching myself, but like I was watching someone else, watching OVER someone else.
No one spoke. There were little forest sounds all around, and I wanted to say something to the girl, like, "c'mon now" or something, but then I looked down and saw the bluettes in her hands, and said nothing. For just a moment -- a moment that was clearer than a glass of water -- I could hear inside the little girl's thoughts. She wasn't me -- we weren't the same person; we were two people who sort of... connected. Not just connected, as you would connect to someone through a telephone, but entwined.
I've dreamed about this girl before. She always looks the same; she's even usually wearing the same little white dress. And as crazy as it sounds, I think she is my daughter. I FEEL like she is my daughter. I feel like her protector. I also feel like she somehow knows everything that's going on inside my head, even though she's so young. She knows me more deeply than anyone ever could. She's an adult in a tiny little body. And then, this time when she popped into my mind, she was a child again, doing a child thing, having a moment alone in her own little mind with her own private fairies, a ray of sunlight, and a handful of little blue flowers. Maybe she is just a dream. Maybe she is my daughter from a past life or something. Maybe she will be my daughter in this life, and she's just waiting for the right time.
She knelt there, thinking little child thoughts. I could barely even imagine them. Maybe something about princes and elves. Maybe something about the lady who lived in the North Star. Maybe something about mudpies. Or horses. Or pretty jewels. I guess those were the kinds of things I thought about when I was three or four. I couldn't quite hear her thoughts. But I watched her, and I thought about how beautiful she was. And although I could only see her hair and the side of her tiny little baby's body, I thought, "she looks like me." I couldn't interrupt her. I let her gather her little flowers, and her innocence, her absolute purity, blew me away. Finally, she looked up, and she looked away from me, deeper into the woods.
She was thinking about her daddy. He was up ahead someplace, although I couldn't see him. But I could see him in her thoughts. He was tall, he was a big man, and handsome like a prince. Like daddies are when you're three. He was kind of old, as daddies are when you're three. To me, to anyone else, he would have been a young man, thirty-five at the very most. But this was her daddy, and he was kinda old. To me, to anyone else, he would have been average height or so; not anything you'd really think about one way or the other, except she was his daughter, and she was tiny, and she thought he was huge. This was her daddy, and I saw him through her eyes. He was her favorite person in the whole world. She loved me too; I felt it -- but it was different. She was daddy's little girl, and she was picking the little blue flowers for him.
I saw her daddy through her eyes.
...And I knew who it was.
For at least two years, I have had little dreams about this child. I had kind of guessed she was supposed to be my daughter in the dreams, because I loved her and I knew I was supposed to take care of her. And because she seemed to know me so well. I kind of had things figured out, sort of. But I'd never stopped to consider who her father was, or who she looked like, or any of that. I'd just never wondered. It didn't make any difference, because she was mine and I loved her, and that was enough.
The whole vision, or dream, or whatever it was, lasted maybe one full second. All of this flooded into my mind and out again, as déjà vu's (?) seem to go. But the hair on my arms was standing absolutely upright. My whole body was sort of tingling and a little weak. Tears came into my eyes. I don't know quite why. I'm not sure if I was happy or scared or WHAT I was feeling. I was feeling overwhelmed, and that was it.
I know her name now, too. She ISN'T me, not any incarnation of me, not a character in a story I read once, not a girl I went to preschool with -- she's real, even if it is only in a dream or a vision or whatever. I know her name. It's a pretty, simple name. I'm not going to write it down here; for some reason, that seems kind of... sacrilegious, although I'm not sure why. I'm not going to tell anyone. I'm going to write it on a little scrap of paper and hide it in my closet.
(And I know who her daddy is... I can't tell that, either. It's like it's a secret, and it's all mine. It's just... I knew -- I've always known, I guess -- that there was something familiar about the way she looked at me... Something familiar about her face, and her eyes...)
Of course, I guess I should tell you that I'm not pregnant by any stretch of the imagination, and don't really plan on becoming pregnant until I know the time is right. I will know. I don't know why I suddenly kind of daydreamed all of this weird stuff for no reason last night. I wasn't really thinking about ANYTHING at the time, except how pretty the song was. Maybe I'm just a nutcase or something -- maybe it was just some weird little fantasy, like the kind you have when you're three and off in your own little world. I don't know. I can't explain. And I'd rather not try.
~H.T.*
"...you know it's true; I'm part of you..." --T. Amos