Dec 21 2008
A ballroom and bedsheets made of sack-cloth
I dreamed I lived in a great, rambling building, which had been abandoned, of course. I didn’t live there so much as stay there, and I slept in the coldest, darkest, moldiest room, which was the worst for sleeping. The building was run by a collective of friends who tolerated me, but resisted becoming too invested in me, because I was leaving, because I didn’t really live there, because I lived nowhere. Many of the rooms of the building had rotted wooden floors and bed-sheets made of tattered sack-cloth, and many of the rooms were very nice, and they led one into the other, like a sort of maze.
One of my friends was stomping around on the wooden floors upstairs and I went to see what was going on. She was in a great ballroom I hadn’t previously known existed, arranging vases of flowers by lamplight.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We’re having a ball, a Christmas ball.” She said, frustrated, as if I should have known, as if I’ve been told already, as if I forgot. That was when I remembered that I didn’t live there, that I had a flight home on the twenty-third, that the twenty-third was today. I woke up then, to a world blanketed in snow that is normally blanketed in rain, and realized that there was no flight. I was home. I was home. My bed pointed east-west, it did not spin. My room did not lift in the air, like Dorothy in Kansas, in the night while I slept. I was home, I could hear, I could think, I could remember. And unfortunately, I was awake.
