Had a dream about Benji a few nights ago. In it, I was trying to grab his lower body under a table and he didn’t refuse but he also didn’t give in. I’d say it was erotic but it kinda wasn’t at all. I was there with my husband, who kept telling me to leave him alone; not because he was upset I was touching another man but because he was embarrassed that I was behaving like a child. In the dream, Benji kept getting fatter and hairier and eventually we all went separate ways and I thought, “is that really the same person I knew all those years ago?”

This is a dream about how I play with my son and how my dad played with me. My dad used to love pinching my legs and annoying me; daring me to hit back and yell at him because he knew I couldn’t. He loved teasing me.

I find myself doing this to my son now. I make him kiss me and hug me around the clock. I pull him away from his toys and smother him with my affection. He resists and pushes me away until he doesn’t.

This morning, he came to my bed and lay quietly next to my sleeping head. Only when I woke up did I realize he had been pointing a small flashlight at my face, clicking it on and off, as if waiting for me to respond but pleased by the fact that I wouldn’t.

Is this how all courtship works?

I dreamt last night in convulsions. Blankets of textures and words, the dense temperature of an attenuated thunderstorm buoyed me but in ticklish configurations. My gender was a nova. I knew it was a dream and kept trying to move this sensation from the back of my mind to my conscious front. The challenge was the victory. The addition, a spoonerism. I want to touch your atomic north. A mouth, wide open to me.

Something big is happening but it is so slow and so subtle that we have to watch it from another universe.