Dreamworld

I lay there in the dark, not quite asleep and not quite dreaming.  I lay there in the same bed I imagined months ago.  The same, but different.  What I had imagined was in fact a mirror image of this place.  The Virginia of my mind was an entirely different world from the Virginia in which I spent my waking, and working, hours.  I listened to the rain splattering across my window.  The wind threatened to lift the tin roof, revealing me like a sardine.  It was difficult to find sleep in this swirling Atlantic weather.  I wondered whether I would have to work in the morning.  It always seemed to be the way the weather worked here.  The clouds spat rain and the wind tossed it loudly against the tin of the trailer, keeping me awake for most of the night.  Yet as the new day approached the clouds always retreated to the north, leaving me to take-on the morning, weary. 

A few months back I imagined a sandy soiled forest, rich with the scent of a salty ocean.  I imagined a quaint trailer, tucked away amongst the pines.  I saw the ocean from my window.  I suppose my daydream was not so far off.  The trailer did back onto a stand of Loblolly Pines, and the beach was less than a half mile down the road.  But there was no magic here.  I was surrounded by noisy campers, and offensively large motorhomes crowded in a sterile and treeless campground. 

But still this did not bother me so much.  I was generally unhappy in this place I had built up in my mind and it had nothing to do with the position of the trailer, or the distance to the beach, or even the fact that I could look out my window and see into the windows of a Bounder.  Instead, there was a flavour in the mouths of many of the locals that I would never grow to tolerate, or even appreciate. 

Virginia, I came to learn, is a very conservative state.  There are activities that are celebrated (or at least tolerated) in the rest of North America, that are discouraged here.  This includes sharing your home with a significant other out of wedlock. 

I learned how serious an offense this was a few nights ago when one of the local park police officers came banging on my front door in the middle of the night.  My boyfriend had just arrived not five minutes earlier, and the tent we were told he had to sleep in, was not yet errected.  I was threatened with a fine and his prohibition from the park.  But in addition to the poisonous words that flew from the mouth of the officer was a look of intense judgement.  It was a look I had never seen before.  Not even from my mother when I was caught skipping school in the eleventh grade.  I was being made to feel shame. 

He left abrubtly after stating an official warning, and all I could do was stare blankly at the floor.  I tried to process the information and tried to make sense of his words in my head.  Law.  Illegal.  Fine.  Prohibited.  But still I could not understand how this 18th century rule could be pressed upon a 27 year-old woman.  Not now, not in this day and age, where gay couples were allowed to express their love through legal marriage in Canada (as well as six of the United States), and America was being led by a black president. 

But Virginia was no dreamworld.  I could scoff at this ridiculous law all I wanted but I couldn't deny the fact that it is written, and there are people who seriously go about punishing those who break it.  I felt oppressed.  I have a new appreciation for the silent (and not so silent) wars fought (and still being fought) by every non-white minority, by women, by homosexuals.  We all want to be accepted, and we do not want to made to feel shame.  I feel silly saying all of this. I'm a fortunate white female, brought up in a middle-class family.  I have a good education, and I was encouraged to voice my opinions, and to believe in what I wanted to believe. 

But not here. 

I'm sure it will all be different one day.  But for the next two months I will be forced to follow a Christian-inspired law... or else.