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Nautilus


I have a recurring dream. It starts simply. Normal. I'm driving my car to a familiar destination — my parent's house or the river or somesuch - just routine, driving through the regular streets, noticing the regular things, not in any hurry but knowing that someone's waiting for me there. I take the requisite meandering turns through the neighborhoods of my life. I know where I am, and I know where I am going.

Inevitably, however, I reach the interstate. As I merge into traffic, I take it in: eight lanes across, a tangle of entrance and exit ramps elevated drunkenly over downtown, curling around each other, tight turns interlocking impossibly like a celtic knot or a child's paper chain.

And regardless of what the season or time of day was before, it is night on the interstate, and moonless. Occasionally headlights glare at me, throwing my night vision, but more and more they appear drowsily as spots of red and white like blinking eyes in the darkness encroaching.

The night has texture and weight. As I navigate sharp turns and steep, sudden hills, it exacts an ever-increasing influence upon my car, a gravity. It takes all my strength, all my will to steer the vehicle, slow it down, control its spin, till every muscle in my body is tensed, my breath is shallow, my heart pounding and the blackness is creeping somehow now into my car into my very eyes my mouth the fight to control the chaos brings careening suffocation.

A simple dream. Mundane. I never saw it for what it was.

Strand after strand, knot after knot, I climb to a better vantage point.

Every hinge of my body is lassoed, web-slung, a cat's cradle catch. My fingers and toes are tingling, and I cannot tell where the cords of my muscles end and where twist of the ropes begin. I am bound, am entwined, and every bit of rope, each fiber hums with my energy, a network of resistance, pulling me larger than myself. A conduit, a catalyst, prying me open, unwinding me slowly and surely, unfurling me singing and wet like the runoverboard of an anchor dropped, splash in waves over my body, skin rippling of black coils, night-wrapped and hanging. I am dangling in a dark and quiet sea.

I let go. This can hold me. I won't fall. It's safe. It is safe. Let it breathe.

Exhale. Hold. Hold. Hold.

Slow. I am reeled back untangled and re-wound. I am a nautilus shining. I am mended, swirling, balanced, sound. I am a nautilus, and I understand.



Madeleine Roux

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