dream

I am running in Dorchester. An easy jog along Adams Street. There is some road work being done at the intersection there but I hop over the scarified pavement and turn left down Gibson. There's a Dunkin Donuts where the gas station used to be and I decide to stop and get a coffee. With a fist full of coins I wait before a linebacker of a man behind the counter addresses me.

"Do I know you? You look familiar."

"Maybe, I used to live around the block on Parkman Street, name's Mansfield."

"I know your brother. You don't want the coffee here, talk to the guys at the police station."

Station 11 is just down the road so I follow his instruction. There are two men in white hard hats standing outside, they are working construction and hold picks and shovels.

"You're here for coffee?"

"Yes." I say and show them my palm filled with nickles and dimes.
"Throw your money away. Go down there," they point to a wide alley with shrubs on either side, "you'll be glad you did."

I toss my coins aside like throwing seeds to a bird and run toward the alley. I am exuberant. I played here as a child. I hop over low fences and climb over tall ones. I jump a half dozen at least before I come to the last. Once over it I am no longer myself. I am a child but more than that. I am my mother as a little girl. Here I find pictures of my mother's brother. He died in 1992 and was my mother's only sibling. I look at them and cry, he looks so young in the photos.

The dream shifts in an instant. I am myself again and am riding a bus with my mother and brother Jimmy. I know he is going to die and that this is the last time I will see him. I cannot tell him this. I look around, the bus has huge windows all around and we are sitting at the very rear. It pulls to a stop and Jimmy gets up and heads out. I watch him, unable to speak. I see him through the window, his son Mason is waiting for him at the stop. He lifts him up in his arm and begins to walk away. At this point I am sobbing uncontrollably, knocking on the window and calling to him but he doesn't hear. The bus rolls away and my mom and I openly weep, the passengers sitting on either side of us oblivious.

It's my gasping for breath that wakes me. I was crying in my sleep and the heartbreak I was feeling becomes all the more real after I open my eyes. My crying rouses Jeff who pulls me into his arms, whispering it was just a nightmare. But it wasn't a nightmare. I saw my brother and now the pain of losing him is a fresh as it was that Saturday in March.