I was at what seemed to be my family's house, though it was a combination of a couple houses I've been in: my grandparents' old house in south Florida, Adam's dad's house (also in Florida), and my family's old house on the other side of the town they live in now. We were moving to Texas, which takes the prize as my least favorite state. There were more people in the house than usual, though. People I'd never seen were joining our caravan to Texas. They seemed somehow familiar, but I didn't want to see them. Perhaps like the relatives we never visit. I was uncomfortable. I didn't want to socialize, and I didn't feel very much a part of the move since I'm in college and don't live with my parents anymore.
There was a pool in back of the house. I wondered why I had very little recollection of swimming in it. I shed my clothes and jumped in. Adam came out of the house and followed my lead.
"Why don't we ever go swimming after having sex?" I asked him. "Or have sex in the swimming pool?"
"I don't know," he said. "This is a wading pool to me."
I thought I had made a less-than-subtle hint that I did want to go swimming after sex, but Adam didn't get it. He tossed a pieces of red candy at me. It was still in the wrapper. He said if I dove under the water to fetch it, I would feel just like I was kissing him.
So I dove for the candy. And I came up from the water with the feeling that I was holding a wet piece of candy in my mouth.
I could see from the pool that all the cars were leaving. I supposed that Adam and I would have to drive to Texas by ourselves. I remembered how long and flat the drive was, and hoped that Adam could drive most of the way so I could sleep.
Then there was an interlude in which my perspective of the dream changed. I was imagining being in a movie about driving to Texas, putting the shots together in my head. I was playing my old story character Mercedes Moreno. I wanted the opening shot to be of Mercedes waxing her Mercedes automobile, and when she announced her name to the audience, a profile of her face was to show as a reflection in the hood ornament. This was irresistably clever to me at first, but then I wondered if something similar had been done in a movie like Crossroads or The Baby-Sitters' Club. I began to doubt my creativity. Then I found myself in my actual bed in my parents' actual house in Georgia, and I was imagining the movie in my head. I wasn't waxing a Mercedes; I was simply having a daydream. It was nighttime and I was trying to go to sleep, but I kept getting too excited about my plans for this movie. I imagined stereotypical "road trip" music playing as Mercedes's car sped down a road between two cornfields. I decided that perhaps her voice could be heard in the background as she narrated the movie through the journal entries she wrote about her trip. I debated whether this was too cliché, because many movies these days had the narrator's voiceover. I figured that my movie wouldn't work without it, and that the audience would gasp with pleasure at the thought that they were hearing the narrator's journal entries.
Then I was back at the swimming pool, which Adam and I abandoned without any kinky activity. Clothes again, we got in his car and began our trip. I knew that, despite how much I tried to remember about last summer's drive to Texas, I wasn't going to fully recognize the utter horror of such a trip until I experienced it again.
