F is for Friction

The everdream continued but it took on a different shape. It had started out brown and golden, as though memories were like photographs and could be turned sepia with age. It then progressed a vivid blue as the dream moved into the recent past. The future, though, that was silver. Not a depressing grey but glimmering swirls of silver-white that shone and sparkled. There were a boy and a girl, neither of whom I recognised. They were playing in a room with alphabet decals on the wall and green carpet on the floor. It wasn’t a room I had seen before (the green carpet made me want to puke to be honest) but the kids seemed comfortable there. They seemed to be around the same age which made me suspect that they might not be from the same parents as they didn’t look like twins. The girl was slim with light blue eyes which shone as she ordered a yellow robot around the room. Another thing I hadn’t seen before: the robot appeared to be voice controlled. The boy, the darker of the two with brown eyes and dark brown hair, yelled at the red robot. In the middle of the room the two robots clashed. No damage was done but the little girl was not happy about her robot being waylaid. She ran to the door in her dark pink tights, light pink skirt and blue t-shirt and threw the door wide. Her lungs were certainly healthy as she yelled ‘Mum!’ so loud that I looked around to see if anyone else had heard. There was no one around. In the everdream Mum came in and told both of the kids to play nice. I wondered why this had been part of the everdream that I was watching. Every part up to that point had been about people who were connected to me. Now I was seeing a stranger telling some kids off? It didn’t seem like it belonged there.
I didn’t have time to wonder, though, because the dream had shut itself off. I was left hanging over my grandparents’ grave bewildered. I felt green, like the carpet in the last part of the everdream. I felt full - as though too many things had been absorbed by me during the dream. There was something not right in that dream.
I was shaken from my thoughts as my mother arrived at the grave with her pup in tow. She began to fuss over the old flowers which were there from her last visit. She replaced them with new ones from her garden and wiped over the area before sitting on the edge. I’d seen her here many times before, in my old life, and I knew that the pain was always present here. I watched her wipe away a silent tear, knowing that we were both holding the internal clashes of pain and loss. We were joined in friction.