Dreams of My Father;

The past few nights I've been dreaming of my father.
The first night we lived in a world of trains-
a maze of tracks winding around the city.
He worked in a factory where they massed produced women who looked like me. 

I couldn't get him to pay attention to me.
He was too busy talking on his cell to even notice me.
He looked right through me.
He walked right past me.
And I ran after him, wanting to tell him something important. 
I chased after him, following the twist of the electrified third rail. 
Trying to get him to turn around. To look at me.
And finally, steps from the platform, he did turn and I was trailing in his wake,
and I yelled something-
Something important,
and he looked at me from across the distance and said nothing.
Then he turned and kept on walking 
and I woke up.


In the second dream he looked the same,
tall and dark in a woolly trench coat,
but there was no factory of women, there was no city of trains.
I kept getting text messages from him written in gibberish. 
Letters that should have made words 
but instead just scrambled themselves into nonsense.

And last night he was there again,
though most of it I've forgotten now.
Except the end.
I was sad, sitting on a curb with my feet in the gutter.
He was behind me when put his hand on my shoulder 
and asked me in a tone I've never heard him use, 
"Lulu, do you have peace in your heart?"
The tears of my dream self to my dream father when I told him, "No.."  
were so real that I woke up with the taste of salt on my lips.


Maybe he gave me advice I couldn't remember upon waking. 
Maybe the advice is there in the question. 
I wish he did care, the way he did in my dream.
I wish he would come around and tell me, 
"Lulu, you are beautiful and you should be happy and you should be loved. You deserve the world."
and I wish it didn't bother me that he won't..