People Get Ready

I think I dreamed my own death last night, God it felt good. I was walking down a street in Soho on a morning just like today, cold and sunny. To myself I was naked, but when I saw my reflection in a store window I was wearing my usual work clothes. There was no cold, no wind, no weight on my steps. I knew I was dead, and knowing it was a candle burning in a clear red glass. I saw other people who were dead too, I knew them because we all were carrying window panes in our hands.

I came to a corner where there's no subway entrance in the real world, but here were the stairs, wide and smooth and filled with people carrying window panes. As we approached the turnstiles a beautiful woman took the windows from our hands and smashed them on the concrete floor, they broke with a sound like the ghost of  a wind chime you heard on a summer night when you were eight years old. She handed each of us a ticket and we went through the turnstile and down to the platform.

The train came rolling in, pulled by a diesel engine from the 1950s. The cars looked so much bigger than normal, or was it just that I was so much smaller? When the doors opened I walked in and sat in a cross seat by the window, it was upholstered so soft and thick and warm that I wanted to go to sleep. The conductor came down the aisle, she had beautiful long hair and the kindest smile I'd ever seen. She handed me a dog, who curled up in my lap. I looked at him and realized he'd belonged to an old lover of mine, more than a lifetime ago.

We climbed out of the tunnel and started up the ramp like we were going to cross the 59th Street Bridge, but we just kept climbing higher and higher, and the sun looked so cold and the sky looked like liquid pearls and the people in the train looked so happy and I'm sure I saw at least two of my old lovers on board.

And when I woke up my body was as limp as a dishrag and I felt disappointed, but I knew it's only a matter of time.