What follows is a submission from @thurisazsalail:

I don’t know much what to say about tomorrow, but reading your post, it brought back something from a dream I had a few years ago, the surreal, all-too-real kind. I was fortunate to have written it down. 6/15/15. Maybe you can gain something more than I can from it.

I was in a small plane crash, like a small one-engine or something the kind like you see at museums from the early 1900s. Two people could fit into it. Not a ‘hard’ crash, but like a rough unplanned landing. Cargo of some kind spilled, valuable stuff, including a large piece of really good quartz (I thought it was odd- quartz is dirt-cheap, it’s everywhere, we manufacture it, but in the dream it seemed to me extremely valuable. It didn’t occur to me that the plane was odd, or that I’m deathly afraid of heights to begin with and would never willingly get in one). No one seemed hurt. A second plane had landed some ways off and the pilots had circled back to us. I was aware there was an ‘us’, two of us in the plane. Somewhere in sight distance, not too far, was a two-story run-down building in a semi-clearing.

I didn’t recognise the type of woods I was in, but it’s the same woods I’m usually in, in my dreams. Not like the woods of 'home’ in Florida. This is someplace else. The climate is cooler, less humidity, less undergrowth, the trees are much older. This is a woods you can really get lost for days in. My Austrian friend says my drawings look like home. Beautiful, but definitely somewhere that inspires ghost stories easily. The trees sound like they’re whispering when there’s a breeze. People stick together in this sort of place. I decided I’ll risk possible enemy people vs. whatever is in the woods. 

People were walking around. It didn’t occur to me until later that all of their clothes were odd. No one wore t-shirts or anything, or even regular sweaters. No one wore jeans or sneakers. Most women had some kind of scarf on, or their hair tied up. Maybe some kind of local 'proper’ thing. There were only maybe 30 people there, including a few kids. Not many. Mostly adults, worn-looking, tired. There was an older man (60s, maybe?) by himself at a bench-like table outside, like a picnic table but old and rough-looking. I couldn’t remember when I woke up what he said, but from what I gathered, the group was some sort of Jewish convention. I didn’t understand the language. The co-pilot came out, the one that was missing. Young woman, short red-brown hair curled up, like a modern 20s false bob. I guess she’d heard what he said and got excited, and says “Oh! I’m Jewish!” He turns and asks her what camp she came from. She looks shocked and hurt. “I’m not from a *camp*. I’m from New York!” The man looked confused, shook his head, and then looked a little … I don’t know how to describe. Not angry. Frustrated? Uncomfortable, I shut my damn mouth. She goes back inside the building. It has one main large room on bottom, it looked like, with two tower-like sides, like a | |_| | shape on the second floor. I had the idea that it isn’t a place for me to go into unless someone invited me.

I’m trying to decide whether or not to say anything at all, about to run off to this guy about how <she didn’t have to prove her fucking ancestry to be a Real Jew, who the hell are you, what kind of fucking litmus test is THAT, how would she know anyways if her family escaped and changed their names?? that was 70 god damned years ago! how the fuck should she know?!> But again, something reminds me to shut my damn mouth. (I’m prone to going off on people before thinking. Then was *not* the time.) I decide instead to ask questions. “What did you mean by that?” He must have known that I was furious. And he explained, patiently, calmly, with a certain… flatness that I couldn’t describe, “We’re all either from the camps, or are descendants of someone who is…” He started talking about the concentration camps like they were active, recent. I wanted to say that they’ve been closed for decades- what are they still hiding from? Didn’t they know that the war ended generations ago? And then it made sense. Single-engine planes. Union colours. Plane painted so it’s harder to see us at night… 

He said, the towers are burning. The building will be destroyed soon. It will be fine, he says. I don’t know what to do now. I panic- shouldn’t we save who we can? He says, there will be another. They will survive. They survived the first two falling, they’ll survive another. The next will be stronger than ever. It’s already being built! I’ll see… The red-haired girl will understand soon, too. The dream was ending, I was told. I went back to looking for the lost cargo. I didn’t know what else to do. Finding an expensive rock seemed so pointless now.


Sometime earlier, in 2014, I had to calmly explain to my youngest sister that her grandfather had died. Suicide as an alternative to aggressive cancer. She didn’t have much time with him in her life, but he came down to talk with her when she was in the hospital to have yet another open heart surgery. She was… 13? Her own father is a terrible person. He laughed at her, mocked her, for being afraid because she wakes up during surgery and the pain meds don’t work. That was probably the kindest he’d ever been to any of us. Even before heart failure, us lot got used to terror early. But my grandfather was good to her and talked to her about ghost stories and science and things she loved. But she wasn’t around much to remember her grandmother, his wife. Too young. She couldn’t know what she really lost.

It occurred to me, the kind of sadness the old man in the dream had… it’s like, when two people have been together for decades, who know each other’s every thought, there’s a certain history and intimacy that no one can even remotely understand fully. They’re babysitting a young grandchild, three or four years old, who is very much attached to both of them. One day, one takes a child to put him down for a nap, and falls over dead. Anuerism, sudden, mostly painless. The child walks out to tell the other that the one grandparent “fell asleep” on the floor. The grandparent has to keep their cool, to keep the child feeling safe, and explain what death is and tell them that everything is going to be okay, and this happens when you’re old… but it also means that person has to put aside their own enormous, unspeakable grief, unable to communicate exactly what has been lost. My grandfather could not explain that to me when his wife died of a heart attack, and I couldn’t explain to my sister how many years she’d lost with both of them. She died in 2015, a few months after the dream. Transplant rejection. Doctors can’t stop it if they only hit healthy tissue during biopsy checkups. She never had a chance. How many things I’d tried to teach her about what it means to live, and to try not to be afraid of what comes. Terrible things always come, they are inevitable. Her father refused to pay for any part of the funeral, likely in retaliation for us trying to escape him. He’s alive, she died. Sometimes evil wins. You have to go on, even when everything is lost.

This loss of decades, this loss of absolute unspeakable intimacy, this kind of patience explaining what death is to a child that could never really understand what was happening- this is akin to why the man at the table was so patient with me when he asked the girl what camp she’d come from. I can’t understand exactly the loss he had seen. But he was so certain that what comes soon will be revolutionary, even if he isn’t here to see it. It doesn’t matter if he’s there to see it. Those who know what to look for, and those who are part of it, will survive. The most important thing is to not give up, and to resist as best as you can.

It’s just a dream, but I still think of it now and then. How real he was, how bizarre the whole scene was, but mostly, his message. So don’t be afraid. Don’t give up. And if you are afraid, and you will be, that is natural, don’t give up. Being alive is resistance. So, resist.