By Travis Roberson
I keep visiting the same places in my dreams. Is that normal, REM cycle apparitions welcoming you back to familiar establishments? This time it’s the upscale restaurant nestled in the heart of downtown Chicago. There are no glaring clues revealing which city sleep deposited me to, except my own intuition telling me yes, this is undoubtedly the Windy City. You like your eggs runny, says the waiter behind the bar. I read once that the human brain can only dream faces it has clocked in real life, which sounds like bullshit. Crows allegedly never forget a face—more internet conjecture—so when they dream do they dream of that old woman who tossed them breadcrumbs in the park? I’ve cooked your breakfast before, the waiter says. The last time sleep unloaded me into this swanky eatery, I sat at one of the tables beneath light fixtures that looked like modern art installations. This time the hostess guides me to the bar, seating me next to Ethan Hawke’s daughter. I think, I can’t afford this place. A restaurant where famous actresses dine. I start fretting over the check and if my bank account can sustain the hit, which feels like a rip-off, the anxieties of the waking world finding me even here. Maya Hawke, she winks at me, tells me I’m funny. We’re hitting it off, but not in the romantic sense. Even in my sleep I’m well aware I’m married and I wouldn’t screw that up—even if it meant an evening with freckled Hollywood royalty. We might end up friends, I think. Me and Maya Hawke. Discussing literature and cracking jokes. Another patron at the end of the bar, who I recognize from earlier in the day when I was still awake (the strange man who barged into my favorite bagel shop demanding the location of the nearest McDonald’s), leaps off his leather barstool and starts scrubbing the marble bar top with a rag generated from thin air. Maya Hawke and me and all the other make-believe occupants, we all recognize how weird and erratic this is. Yet we allow it, lifting our plates and drinks, letting him scrub—as if this has happened 100 or 1,000 or 1,000,000 times before. Maya Hawke smiles at me, flashes a look that says, This again, am I right? And the weird man is scrubbing, scrubbing. And we’re all amused. We’re all happy to be here again.
Travis D. Roberson is a New York based writer originally from central Florida. His work appears in The Iowa Review, Pithead Chapel, Juked, Cutleaf, and many other publications. He is both a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, as well as a Porter Fleming Literary Competition winner, in the non-fiction category. He also serves as a CNF Editorial Assistant at CRAFT. You can find more of his work on his website.
