Dream d411-s: North by Sound Alone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sea wall path ran along the top of the embankment, the stones fitted flat and worn smooth by salt and feet, the sea fifteen meters below and visible in sections between the concrete pillars that reinforced the wall's face. There was no landmark ahead. The path ran to where it curved out of sight and then presumably continued, though I had no information about what came after the curve.

Lano was ten meters ahead on the flat stones, his white coat picking up the grey of the overcast. He moved without urgency, without dawdling. A pace that covered ground.

The sound of the waves below was rhythmic in the way that is not actually rhythmic: close to a pattern but not resolving into one, each set of three or four waves building toward a similarity and then varying. I had spent years in rooms where that near-pattern was designed and delivered through speakers. Here it was arriving from weather and geography, no intention behind it. It felt the same.

The bag shifted on my back and I adjusted the straps. The notebooks made the weight sit high, which changed how my shoulders held. I had been aware of this for two hours. There was nothing to do about it.

The wind came in off the water at an angle, flattening the grass on the embankment's seaward face, pressing my jacket against my left side. It was not cold. It was present. Salt smell, something carrying a faint biological note from kelp exposed on the rocks below.

I had not written anything since the kilometer marker. There was nothing to write. This was not a place of patterns to record. This was the space between patterns.

At a point where the path widened briefly around an old signal lamp housing, its light long dead and its housing orange with rust, Lano stopped. He stood still for a moment, both ears forward. The wind dropped for two or three seconds into something close to silence: only the wave sound from below, only the sound of my own walking stopping. Lano said, "quieto," very quietly.

I stopped. We stood.

The wind returned. Lano walked on.

I walked on.

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Carried north: The body has its own knowledge now. It does not need to be reviewed. Moving through something is enough.