In the most frightening moments of my young life, I used to fall asleep after hours of insomnia or inconsolable crying and have a recurrent dream that placed me in my grandmother’s house, in Bogotá. In my childhood, this house appeared to me as enormous and filled with mystery. In my dream, my flight is undetectable and makes me feel light like a feather. I recognize every corner, and fly swiftly around the high ceilings with the familiarity of someone who has always lived there.

The house always seems to be empty when I visit, and I always seem to want to go to the same place at the end of my flight: my uncles’ room. There, the big armoire awaits. Its front door frames a full-length mirror, shaped at the bottom as a miniature staircase. We all used to play on that little staircase when we were children. We would climb up and down with our fingers pretending to be tiny people reflected on the big mirror. But in my dream, I am not going up the stairs with my fingers. I somehow descend from the ceiling, and become so small that I am able to climb the stairs as if ascending the steps of a wooden castle. When I reach the top of the stairs I fly again, this time I land on top of the tall  armoire. There, I find layers of dust collected year after year… I know nobody has been up here before and nobody can see me. So, I curl up, pressing my thighs against my chest, and sinking my face between my knees…and like that, I wait for his voice to call me. Then I hear it: my grandfather Adolfo calls me by the nickname that he gave me (when I already had one), and the sound of his voice is a whisper in my ear, but it also resonates throughout the empty house as a powerful warning to the demons that torment me: “Mi Zorrita,” he says. And everything goes quiet. Then I open my eyes, and find myself back in my bed in New York.

I haven’t had this recurring dream in many years. And not because I have lacked moments of fear or desperation, but just because it hasn’t come back to me. My grandfather died 40 years ago, when I was a teenager. I had been quite attached to him. A trained portrait photographer, he was temperamental and moody, shamelessly biased toward some of his grandchildren, and passionate about reading. He used to call me “mi Zorrita” (my little fox), a funny take on my middle name, Zoraida. I enjoyed visiting him. I loved the way he smelled like tobacco, the oblong shape of his finger nails, and the way he wore his long wool coat and a tilted fedora hat to church. I loved his voice when he taught me rhymes. He’d ask me to recite them out loud, gesturing wildly with my arms, as if I were a politician on the campaign trail. Some weekends, I’d stayed for a sleepover at his house. In the morning, I’d ran to his bed to get some bread dunked in hot cocoa that we called “sopas,” and that he liked for breakfast while he read the Sunday paper. When we went out together, I craved those loose, dry fava beans that he carried in his side pocket, and that he handed to me one-by-one to make our long walks shorter.  

His voice was always a place of peace to me. It is not a surprise that my mind would choose it to be that lifeline that reached through my dreams to wake me up from the drunken stupor of my melancholic sleep. 

As the years have passed, and I continue to dream, I have found myself in other places of peace. Always empty. Places filled with familiar objects that welcome back my undetectable self, as if I had never left. They exist in my memories, even if they have fallen apart or disappeared in reality. They save me from the world I face when I am awake and nurture my soul back to health while I sleep. These places of peace are the home of my dreams.  

Para José F.