Some dreams
I dreamt I was desperately trying to get my gold hoops into my ears after running from danger in the dark. I dreamt the entire earth imploded under me for a long moment, leaving my son and I levitating from bed, close enough to touch the ceiling with my nose, and when we landed, I knew the world was forever altered for worse. In the dark, I felt for my son who weakly called for help but I was paralyzed in a night terror now and could not respond, move, close my eyes. My husband ran in and grabbed my shoulder so hard it risked pulverizing my body. I woke up close to a panic attack drenched in cold sweat. When I returned to sleep I in Rhode Island visiting a drummer who is actually from Philadelphia, who was advocating for me to take a job at Brown University. I was given a test on the spot—questions written on a flip chart in a stately ancient library. As academic onlookers waited for my answers I felt confident about my odds but after acing the test I struggled to find my way out of a verdant maze with routes assembled from broken bookshelves and haunted objects. In what they said was the final step of the maze I had to leap a hundred feet into the air toward open seas with a group of boys, and trust I would land safely. We flew, and I was surprised at how comfortable I was with my buoyancy in the air. I realized I was reciting a mantra to myself—this moment, too, is important and fleeting. I landed with bare feet on mud that felt like the flesh of an amphibious beast. We climbed a narrow staircase and fled through a doorway that led us predictably back to the middle of the maze where I was the most confused. I knew intuitively that the way out of the maze was to traverse these thresholds with the right people. People who needed my guidance. I dreamt you had a broken eye. I felt sorrow, but it felt marginally better than fear. I smelled the smoke of eucalyptus I’d burned earlier in the evening, and momentarily remembered this, too, felt marginally better than the cigarette I avoided all day.