Escape and Return 12/10/08

…finally, Josh speaks. “I went to Peru for a little while,” he says. A little confession.
“Hmmm. And what did you do there?”
“I sold dream catchers on the side of the road.”
I want to stay angry with him, but the smile is already forming. “You did not.”
“Yep. I did. I sold dream catchers by the side of the road. I had a little stand made out of bamboo.”
“Bamboo? Really? Where did you get bamboo in Peru?”
“It grows there.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Sure does. It’s a little known secret, but bamboo grows in the rainforests of Peru.”
I don’t want to believe him but I know that he’ll insist upon it. I remain quiet, but he goes on.
“Then one day, I’m at my stand and this bus pulls up.”
“A bus?”
“Yup. A huge tour bus, carrying one of Peru’s biggest rock bands.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
“They bought all my dream catchers. Every last one of them. And they were so taken by me that they invited me to go on tour with them. I didn’t have any dream catchers left so I figured, why not? I left my bamboo stand on the side of the road and went. We travelled all over Latin America. We went everywhere. I mean everywhere. This band didn’t care what size the venue was, they just liked getting gigs and there were plenty of shady bars to go to, especially in Ecuador.”
“Oh, stop.”
“What.”
“None of that is true. Not a single word.”
He shrugged. “Maybe it is.”
“Well with maybes anything is possible. You’re right though, it could be true. How would I know?”
He sits for a while, messing with the cuff of his shirt, drinking. “I did go to Peru,” he says. “I stayed in a little house on the beach. It was pleasant. Very calm.”
“People were looking for you.”
“I know.” He seems to consider this for a while.
“I have clippings.”
“What?”
“From when you disappeared. I have newspaper clippings. I saved them.”


I wrote this almost a year ago. It’s a lot of dialogue, which I wasn’t thinking about when I picked it. I chose it because I liked the story about selling dream catchers in Peru. It was a mini story inside the real story. The real story was about a woman whose ex-husband shows up years after he disappeared. It came from a prompt about a woman hearing a key in the door while her husband is away on a business trip. I made up all the stuff about it being her ex-husband. I think I chose the topic because it was about escape and it was still hopeful. At the time, I was going through a lot of stuff in my life. I felt alone, slightly abandoned. I wanted to be rescued. Earlier in the year I had been left by someone that I really cared about. I don’t know if ‘left’ is the right word, but ‘deserted’ would really be the wrong word. Either way, I lost someone that I cared about (temporarily, I would find out later) and at the same time I was struggling to find friends in a city I had lived in for almost a year. I was having problems with people I worked with and I just felt really alone. I needed someone, but I didn’t know how to tell anyone.

This story came out of the hopelessness I was feeling at the time and the hopefulness that I wanted to feel. The narrator of the story was left years ago and spent time alone, then gave up on the idea of ever feeling love for someone the way that she felt it for her first husband. She finds someone new, but the idea is that she never loves the new man enough. Her life is a waiting game, forever hoping that the other man will come back. He does.

I never got past this. He comes back and they spend time talking about the old times and the changes that they have been through, but I never finished the story. I don’t know if they end up together or not. I think maybe I was scared to find out. I wanted so much for people to come back in to my life that I didn’t want to think about the awkwardness of having to actually say goodbye to those people, or what it would be like to discover that you had grown away from someone. I’m not ready to return to it yet, though I think that there’s a lot of good stuff in this story. I still don’t know how this story ends, but it did offer me an option if my writing doesn’t work out:

I’ll go sell dream catchers on the side of the road in Peru.