The present tense is all about immediate feelings, about wanting and lack. The present tense is about things that you don’t notice until you can’t help but notice them. The present tense is for when you are in your living room crying and the person you love is somehow a part of that, and suddenly there are two possibilities, and the present tense is telling you that you have to choose. The water in the teakettle is boiling. Your tea is ready; either you drink it or you don’t.
As a child, I used to love the future tense: I will be going and I am going to.
With dreaming, we speak differently. We use the past tense. Dreams are about the past, but we want them to be about the present, the future. That is, we will make them mean something. I was standing over a cliff, looking down on a raging black river. My childhood home drifted in the river. There were no sounds; there was only blackness and stars. Maybe the dream wants to tell me that I have detached myself from something I love; maybe the dream wants to tell me that I will detach myself from something I love. Maybe the dream wants to tell me that despite my wanting otherwise, what I love has detached itself from me, has already begun a journey to make itself live apart from and far from me. What separates me from my childhood home is three hundred yards of falling. To join what I love means to risk dying.
There is a certain kind of daydreaming that can foretell the future. There is a certain kind of daydreaming that only concerns bad futures. In this type of daydreaming, we sink and sink until somehow somewhere inside that dream something loves us again; something or someone says sorry for something that is being talked about in the past tense.
It could happen this way: my mother is still twenty-eight, and she’s sewing me dresses and teaching me how to crochet baby blankets for my dolls. If I finish one too soon, she tells me to pull out the yarn and begin again. It could happen this way, being transported back to this very unraveling, and like characters in a movie or story who are jolted out of a quagmire simply by waking, I too will realize that I am not living here, that I am still this very small child learning at the hem of her mother. If not a dream, then it could be that my life thus far has merely been an intense daydream. Or perhaps I am presently living a daydream that I dreamed previously. At what point is what I dreamed mine and then not mine?
At what point are you mine and then not mine?
This summer, I drove through Wyoming with my father. I had never been to Wyoming, and I certainly never did think I would ever be driving through Wyoming with him; more surreal: it was July, but it was thirty degrees. I was suffering from an attack of shingles, and every once in a while, a bolt of nerve pain would start from my spinal cord and shoot through me. This is all past tense. In the future, I will think back to Wyoming’s prairie grass and want to tell others how beautiful it was, how the sky, a deep crystal blue, was reflected in puddles within that grass, how the wind, furious and fast, thrashed the grass about until the whole otherwise-bleak landscape became something else, something mythical and existing momentarily, hills of sleeping dreams. I remember thinking that I loved my father and wanted to tell him. I told him instead that the sky was so beautiful in the puddles, that the grass looked as if it were alive and full of sparkling stars.
At what point do we let go of the past and enter the present? Wyoming quickly turned into Colorado, and there was a whole other landscape to contend with, a sharper world of peaks and blades, whiteness and grayness, and a sky that was not so deep but a shallow gray-blue. Along the roadsides, there were stones and boulders that once were mountains, which have recanted into another slumber, a slumber that will last for many future years. At what point is a boulder no longer a mountain? And despite the many “Beware of Falling Rocks” signs, I never saw one fall.
At what point are you mine and then not mine? If I follow you into your dreams, then_____________. This is a conditional: if, then. You and I together then, we come together to form separate dreams where something could occur, might occur, should occur, would occur, could have occurred, might have occurred, should have occurred, or would have occurred. We call this the conditional tense, although some grammarians do not believe in it, suggesting instead that these conditionals are merely the past or perfect forms of can, may, shall, and will. But I know the difference; I know they aren’t the same. Because the former is about dreaming and the latter is about having, or another form of having. Pregnancy could occur, might occur, should occur, would occur, could have occurred, might have occurred, should have occurred, or would have occurred vs. Will you . . .? I will. You may, but choose not to. At what point do our dreams depart? At what point do we stay together regardless?
There are verb tenses in writing that are not taught in schools. These are tenses that one learns instead when one grows older and knows that things will either be or not be, when one
