E is for Everdream

I turned my back to the park and headed up the street on which my mother’s house stood. I still couldn’t remember the colour of the roof so I counted the houses on the left, counting by twos on the odd numbers so I would know when I got to her place. It turned out that I shouldn’t have worried so much — I could see my mother’s car in the driveway. I zoomed quickly by the windows, seeing as much as I could of the interior without staying in a fixed place. I didn’t want her to see me and be scared, I just wanted to know that she was okay. When I got around to the backyard I realised that there was no way I would find her here. Her dog was not in the yard so that meant she must be walking with the dog and I knew exactly where to look.
Some people might think it macabre that she walked the dog at the local cemetery  but mum had always found it peaceful. I remember a few years back when my sister and I offered to take mum out for lunch for her birthday and she told us that the only thing she wanted to do was walk the dog. I hadn’t been to the cemetery for a while even though my grandparents were buried there. I didn’t like the idea of visiting the bodies they no longer inhabited as a form of remembrance. When I wanted to think of them I would rather dredge up a childhood memory of them than look at cold stone with their names on it. When I reached the cemetery I decided to go to my grandparents grave. Part of me was curious to learn how I would feel about visiting them in their place of rest (although I’m not sure you could call my condition rest as I had just flown three-quarters of the way around the world). A larger part of me hoped that perhaps they might be hanging around there too. Maybe they knew that their daughter, my mother, was nearby and maybe they had decided to visit her too. I looked at their grave from above, recognising the marbled grey stone and white chips with flashes of quartz that caught the sun and glinted light into the tears I would inevitably shed during my visits here. There was no one here, alive or ethereal. As I was alone I swept a little closer to better examine the site. I was hovering above the modest headstone when the everdream hit. I call it that now but then I had no idea what had happened. I tingled all over as though I were in the middle of a Tesla coil. I felt like I had turned a piercing light blue even though I had no colour that I was aware of. Images rapidly flipped through me; extremely fast but I could see all of them clearly and in detail. Some were old — I saw a girl in full colour running down the street to a woman. The girl, I knew from a sepia-stained photo my mum kept, was my grandmother and the woman was her mother. Then a man in an army uniform, proudly straight-backed with black wavy hair pushed from his forehead by a wet comb; my grandfather as a young man. The thing about everdreams is that they don’t just show you the past, though. They show you ever - everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen. I didn’t know that at the time, which is why I was too late.