Mary Thompson I love Roy Orbison. I don’t claim to be his most ardent or knowledgable fan, but I love him all the same. I once wrote a short story and read it to an audience as a poorly created excuse to defend my love for him. I’ll make a fool out of myself for him, a fool for love. My favorite of Orbison’s songs are little altars to longing. He was a man dedicated to loneliness and dreams and lonely dreams. Dreaming is for the solitary, done in isolation and silence where the noise of others can’t distract you from creating something beautiful, like the song “In Dreams.” I forget about “In Dreams” until I am reminded of it and then I play it over and over on repeat until I let it drift out of my daily routine. The cycle begins again. Try as I might, I can’t fall asleep to this song or feel at ease with it. I have a bad habit of wanting consume the things I love and inhabit them, but I cannot fully own this song because of Blue Velvet. Lynch’s use of it transforms it from a perfect song into a perfect scene, made creepier and lonelier still. The scene glows behind my eyelids as I close them to sleep, as if Roy or Benny, his sauve impersonator in Blue Velvet, are my very own candy-colored clown. But they are not and they do not bring me dreams. More and more I have trouble sleeping, let alone dreaming. This little essay began from notes I typed quickly on my phone app. It lives right besides another one that I only look at in the middle of the night. I mantra myself into a calmer state and, even though it doesn’t usually bring sleep, it reduces the panic. I repeat, “There is nothing you can do right now. You’ll deal with it in the morning.” Go to sleep. Everything is all right. Do I deal with it in the morning, though? I usually have the same stresses in the daytime, but I am better at ignoring them. When I can’t ignore them, I listen to a playlist I made entitled “Relax, Nerd.” It’s filled with Beach Boy songs (more loneliness) but no Orbison. Occasionally I fall asleep just fine. I even dream. Often my dreams are stress dreams, nightmares of indecision. I wake with bloody lips, my teeth worrying at them the whole night through. But every now and then, if I am lucky, I dream of you. Sometimes I fall asleep and have a pleasant dream in which we are having a good day. You and me. You are 2000 miles away. I talk to you about watching Blue Velvet for the first time. You sing “In Dreams” to me over the phone. You joke as if you don’t have a good voice. We wish each other sweet dreams, a blessing we give back and forth often. Sometimes the wish comes true, like it did last night. You seemed so close then, but only in dreams.
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