Catching

Last night, I dreamt in red. The whole thing was tinted over, like in a photo lab, the old kind, even before everyone went digital and everything that came after, when we had to shut ourselves away to develop the images we'd caught in a box. It made sense, you know, how the process mirrored what you were doing. You were catching images in the camera, which was a box of sorts, and then there you were in another black box developing the images  you'd caught with the help of chemicals, but this time the images were catching you.  

I remember having that smell on my hands when I first learned to print, because I used to do it gloveless, and  then later bringing my hands up to my nose and smelling them as the day passed, once I was back outside in the world, and it, the smell, changing as the hours went by because bits of the chemicals had sunk in my skin while others evaporated in the world around me, which morphed everything. But it was a harsher red in the dream;  it hurt my eyes and I had to squint the whole time.

It's the first time I've woken up in this place and have been happy to find myself confined to these four walls. Usually it's the opposite. The night before I dreamt of Sue, trotting down the road with her duck. That was  good dream. It was also a good road. Clean, and Kansas-like, wheat and corn growing high at her sides, wildflowers springing in places out of the asphalt.  I miss Sue.

And, it also made me think, the red dream did, of where that red comes from, so recurring. Like about at what point -- that specific point (if it's specific) -- we construct who we are, our identities. Or begin to.  Because I know exactly where that red comes from, what it trails back to.  

It comes from Lagos, Nigeria, 2008. I can recall it faster than any image, it just springs up whole and fast and moving. My mother was on a mission, and Eli, the man driving us had a red handkerchief around his neck...

 Driving in Lagos was like driving in a Bosch painting -- fast and hot-rodded to metal; balmy. The cars were impossibly close to one another. Hunks of un-nameable rusted iron passing for automobiles and mixing with beamers, side by side. They fucked, those cars, they didn't make love in all their touching of one another -- they crashed into each other, were motors, desperate to feel the rough skin of tin to cool their engines. It wasn't like later, not like my hand on the stick of a Porsche down an interstate in California, or like the smooth leather of a Maserati shouting through a clean paved road: I, my dear, my love, I am elegance. No, that there, that was a fuck-fest, it was desperation and desire gone awry. That was Lagos. I was ten years old, and I was in the back seat with mom, sticking to the leather.