I Dream

I dream about the past, about my childhood home, or the house in Vermont. I am always acutely aware that I am reliving my childhood; the walls of these homes seem borderline fluid as I try to gauge how much longer I must exist within them. I touch the windows, but there is never anything to see out of them, as if I am being denied my own reflection. As if the act of remembering is a form of evaporating.

I am in a dollhouse, almost, I am a figurine, I am a figment of someone's imagination, perhaps Freud's or Nietzsche's. I dance around bigger issues like a ballerina hell-bent on winning a place in the Nutcracker Suite.

I dream with sticky fingers. I am that child that puts its fingers in the cake's frosting, leaving an indent in the pretty image without knowing its true consequences. I reach out for someone, but it's always in the abstract, there's no more time, it's over and like a Picasso painting, I am left in parts, Tetris squares that don't add up.

I dream in Dorothy's ruby red slippers, because if I tap them together three times, I can wake up and not remember having tried so hard to escape my own mind.

I dream of the future. I dream that she is giving birth, and that I am there, and every time, it is a baby girl. I dream that everything is going horribly wrong and I am at the center of it all, screaming into a microphone that has not been tuned and is deafening everyone.

I dream about flutes made of meat, rotten figs falling from trees. I dream and then I do not. I dream about the past, and the future, and decide upon waking up to count my breathing, because I am usually hyperventilating. I input some important information incorrectly, forgot to file my taxes. It's always the same. It's always about a mistake.

I dream and then I wake up. If I reach out, I can touch my childhood home, but it is soft, or made of glass, and not at all what I expected, and then I wake up, confused that my brain could somehow make my memory of it even more convoluted than if I had just talked to my therapist about it.