A Note on Dreams, September 2023
When my heart breaks open, everyone I’ve ever known and every place I’ve ever lived rush in to fill the space. When my heart breaks open, my dreams become a deluge — a feverish survey of former lives.
On the top of a mountain in Northern California I find my high school best friend and her little sister snowboarding and we unearth frozen chrysanthemums from the snow — perfect geometric globes of petals preserved in time by the cold.
I walk down the hill to a chaotic Brooklyn street where teenage boys are robbing their neighbors. I use my own key to get into an apartment I rent from my warm Irish landlady in Dublin, who rented to me during the early days of the pandemic. And when I’m inside the apartment building, I go to a common library room for a work meeting with my old coworkers from Santa Cruz.
My brain combines two men who broke my heart at drastically different times of my life, but who both have the same name and hair. In this world, though, they are the same man at different times of his own life, and I’m working on a group project with him at a busy city college campus in New York. He moves into a room in my building and I find new packages of women’s latex leggings on the floor.
The thing that stays the same is a small hope inside of me that will be crushed eventually like decisive fingertips pinching out a matchstick flame. But still, in this world, I gaze after him — the one that is two — smitten.
I check Instagram on a break from class and an ex-friend has come back to the app after a decade. I see her name and face lit up at the top, and turn off my phone.
In a shadowy lobby I see a close friend from California and he casually mentions that his wife died earlier that week. I’m in shock. But he shrugs it off and says, “It may have been good for her” — and she appears beside us in perfect health, with long hair like when they first met. She is both past and present, and I toil with her death as we chat.
September 24, 2023
