Woolgathering
dreams made of lace, the smell of the summer, a song on the end of the world
June 20 — I need to sleep. My dreams have been vivid. In them, I run into people I know, especially people I don’t want to see. I behave as avoidantly as I would in the waking world, making quick U-turns on staircases.
The more well-rested I am, the more groggy I feel. That’s just how it is, isn’t it? people say. I move throughout the afternoon in an itchy state, the whole of me bloodshot, vulnerable. I try and dress up nicely to an event in lower Manhattan, perhaps because I’m paranoid. The dreams never manifest in the waking world, but I am glad I at least tried, reapplying lipstick and deodorant in superficial intervals. One can never be too careful. I do pass an ex of an ex’s identical twin briefly on the street, a woman I have only ever seen on Instagram, and maybe once at a club months ago. She doesn’t see me, but for a moment I envision our trajectories hurtling toward one another on a crude map. All raw chance.
=
When I arrive home, there is a silver ring with an opal-like stone sitting on my desk. I know instantly that it is yours. C must have swept and found it. I think of all the nights you crashed in our apartment and probably struggled to sleep with the one pillow and blanket I kept for you on the shelf below our liquor cabinet. I imagine your arm dangling down, the ring slipping off at some point in the night and rolling under the sofa. I pull it on and off of all of my fingers, trying to see which one fits best.
There’s that scene in Frances Ha: one of the girls teaches the other to hold her hand above her head in order to slip a stubborn ring off. Let the blood drain out.
We were sort of like them, I’d thought. I was you with different hair—we were married lesbians without a sex life—you left town without saying goodbye. I think I remember now how much you hated that movie.
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Last night, I dreamt that an old man lived upstairs. He was blue and frail, with tangled limbs: I realize now he was sort of like Picasso’s Old Guitarist. I hid in a nonexistent cellar while he screamed and death-rattled. I woke in a panic. The noise persisted, real, but fainter than in the dream. I turned and C was breathing through his nose. A rasp, just a slight whistle.
I could feel a crease of sweat in the top sheet beneath my neck. I turned on a loop of rain sounds, forgoing the sleep timer, and thrust my phone back under my pillow.
=
Everyone is wondering if it might rain today. Walking to E’s, the street is quiet, and the air heavy like that. The smell of summer, I think. Someone is having a barbecue.
G tells us about the wildfires in Canada. I haven’t really looked at my phone yet. Later, she sends us a video the algorithm fed her, full of beautiful images—the sun, punctured on the tip of the Empire State’s needle.
On my way home, the sky is undeniably orange, the smell is more like cinders. I have forgotten my headphones at E’s, so I walk quickly through the ten blocks, trying to notice as little as possible. Still:
A man at the Jerk stand says he swears he’s seen me on TV
I stop to investigate a tiny dead rat on someone’s front steps—so pristine it might be sleeping—with its chin resting perfectly on top of a cigarette
I pass Classon Avenue’s most beautiful church, and notice a small hole punched through one of the dirty stained-glass windows
I’m walking by two men on Fulton when I have a brief sneezing fit. Bless you, one of them says to me, and after I mumble a thank you too quiet to comprehend, he calls me a bitch
Outside of the post office’s lot, the barbed wire on a fence looks like scribbled cursive. One light pulses on, off, on. It’s all the more ominous.
I make it home. Apocalyptic, C and I text one another at the same time. How we haven’t really lived through anything just yet.
I arbitraily think of Czeslaw Milosz:
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
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I must have bitten the left side of my tongue at some point in the evening, but I don’t remember when. I must have bit it hard. I dreamt the other night that I was bad-mouthing you to everyone we knew, and that they nodded silently along in awkward pity: in the dream, you had been dead for a while, but I hadn’t processed it yet, and no one had the guts to keep reminding me. When I woke up, I had the horrible urge to call you. Instead I scrolled through Instagram and tried to let my pride get back in the way.
I have only had this type of dream before about my own twin—ones where he is dead but I keep forgetting why, how, and when. Still, every time one of my parents calls me and I don’t pick up, I am seized by guilt. When they tell me they are worrying over bad news, they tell me that they don’t want me to worry, and I worry anyway. Worrying is my sport of preference: racing those laps of uncertainty.
=
The smog clears, and I venture into Ridgewood. One of my bosses sent me extra money to go get a massage there. The last time I saw her, she thrust her thumb into my shoulder: see, that’s tight. You’re becoming like me.
I can’t help but remember when another 33-year-old sent me money to see his sister’s acupuncturist, years ago now. It was when I’d first moved to the city. I’d complained to him once about losing my sense of smell, even though I’d never tested positive for Covid. He’d snatched my notebook from me and written the phone number in giant, strange font among my chicken-scratch cursive.
The practice was closed then, of course, so the acupunturist had Facetimed me and asked me a complex series of questions, including ones about my bowel movements I hadn’t known how to answer. He ended up prescribing me a bottle of herbs in capsules and an oily tincture. The liquid leaked fire out of my nostrils, even when I’d laid in a supine position for half of an hour. I had strange dreams when I took the herbs, especially when I slept next to the 33-year-old. In one, we travelled the world to find a missing meat cleaver and argued the entire time.
Although appreciate the thought, I think I’d like my next 33-year-old mentor figure pay for a hypnotherapist. Even if I only went one time.
=
I travel home for a weekend. We’ve been attempting to get to North Carolina for over twelve hours now, so C falls asleep on the couch and I walk out of the front door without my phone. The neighborhood I grew up in is encased in silence. Nothing seems to move, same as always. I cross over the sun-filled asphalt, and venture past the dead end where a sewage pipe leads out to a creek. I’m trying hard to let myself lean into nostalgia, to catch it in some scent or quality of the air. I feel like I only have a short window for this—I have to get it while I can. I become distracted over the prospect of snakes and insects and getting caught tresspassing. I forge behind a few houses, towards where a stretch of green appears to be glowing beneath a break in the pine trees’ canopy. When I look behind me, I have trampled a winding line in the tall grass. I want to lie down in it now, but don’t. That’s probably not something I would have done as a kid, anyway.
The bed at my mother’s house is so comfortable that it makes my mattress in New York seem like a slab of stone. I sleep very well, but have even weirder dreams. They are so precise in their absurdity that I can remember their details now, even weeks later:
My other boss is chain-smoking while running a popular deli slash obscure money laundering operation out of a mall food court, and shortly after he is sentenced to prison for thirty years. He says sayonara to me behind bars and leaves me with a lot of mysterious paperwork
I’m in a fancy rehab with my step sister’s roommate, and I give her a haircut so atrocious that she demands all of the coins in my wallet as recompense. A ring that resembles the one I found on my desk at home—except thinner and smaller—falls out with the coins, and she takes that, too. I feel very upset by this, but say nothing
I’ve just gotten my IUD replaced and I bump into a friend I haven’t seen in almost two years on the patio of a large bookstore-cafe. He is angry with me for prolonging my inability to procreate. I ask him why, and he points to a stamp on his hand that appears to be Jesus Christ burning up on the cross, and for some reason I understand that this symbolizes a recent nuclear genocide in Israel. I feel awful and apologize to him profusely
I’m tasked to put all of the contact lenses I’ve brought with me on my trip into the eyeballs of an entire flock of sheep, who are suprisingly compliant and seem kind of pleased by this development. Are they smiling? I can’t really tell now because they’re blurry
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In A Field Guide To Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes about recurring dreams she had of her childhood home, wandering through it or otherwise pacing its periphery, as if her psyche was stuck there. In dreams, nothing is lost, she wrote, the weight of a dream is not in proportion to its size. Some dreams are made of fog, some of lace, some of lead. Some dreams seem to be made out of less the usual debris of the psyche than bolts of lightning sent from outside.
I’ve been in the habit, most of my life, of assigning meaning to almost everything. Perhaps it’s a symptom of hypercaution, of superstition. And maybe it’s a futile gleaning process. The real and strange texture of the everyday becomes itself a reverie, and seems to make as little sense as the dreams do. The more I gather from both, the harder it is to tell the difference between debris lining the streets or mingling in the air and the debris of the psyche. All this to say—I need to sleep. ===