Do You Want to Be a Catfish, Dear?

Last night I dreamt you didn’t love me, and I dove into the river. With silt settling beneath my nails I swam among the catfish, comfortable to glide with eaters of mud. “Yuck” my father said to me. “That’s no good dear - no good at all.”

“Dad,” I said, “sometimes dreams are just dreams without meaning - and maybe it’s not so wise to make meaning out of things that don’t need it.”

“Or maybe,” he said to me, “you’re a catfish.”

I thought of all the things in my waking days that could equate to being a catfish. Flashes of a life I once knew in torn shoes and discount cards blurred into brighter pictures of me in my current clothes, sparkling and new.

I had never cared for color, the unnaturally priced kind at least; and now I found myself cloaked in every kind of Gucci - although I had earned and donated just as much as I burned in spoils so maybe that couldn’t be it at all.

“I think it might be my health,” I told father, “I’ve been feeling unwell and eating worse and although I have been pressing forward, I don’t feel strong anymore.”

The conversation didn’t last long, my father wasn’t in the mood for games. He said to me “I think you know just what your dreams mean to say and that you’re lying to the both of us”

“It’s my health,” I said again.

“Okay.” He told me. “I’ll talk to you later.”

That’s the thing about bad habits, the things that turn us gray and cold. It creeps up on you, a light and misty fog that thickens with each and every passive agreement made in silence.

Until eventually you can’t seem to tell the difference between you and the things in your surroundings you promised yourself you would never be.

I’ve been looking for love in the wrong places and my father taught me that you can’t plant seeds to grow in running rivers.

But you can eat them.

And so I have guzzled the grit, swallowed it without chewing and now new life brews inside me. I am the Earth, fertile and formidable.

No longer am I swimming in the silt, but rather I am the silt itself, rich in minerals - pushing up against the river banks waiting to give life to a new crop.

I am brown, like my father. Yet until now I have been painting myself pretty colors hoping to attract bees, and have been swarmed by flies - in silence.

And you can’t plant seeds to grow in running rivers.