I’m transporting some crystal arm down the street. It’s clumsy and an awkward shape and heavy but only because there is no proper way to hold it. I’m also carrying other things. It’s odd, the crystal arm, and I’m not sure I like it so when I drop it and it breaks, I’m neither terribly surprised nor bothered. Except it was a gift. And I’m only worried that when the giver visits they will wonder where it is and why I’m so ungrateful to carelessly ruin it.

I’m teaching. A student proposes joking rules and I take them from his mouth and put them on the board. He said them in jest and quietly. I impose the rules and run the class under borrowed tyranny and make the entire class suffer for someone’s joke. No one else ever makes careless jokes. The school has an apartment building over top of it. I go up to my apartment to discover that a number of my students live on my floor. Awkward. Then I discover this is not my floor. I go up another floor. I am followed by an ever-expanding group of tittering girl students. I encounter a squirrel, plump and sedate, in the hallway. This new floor has all of the same numbers on the doors as the floor below. Every time I go up a floor the numbers on the doors are all the same; a floor lower than my apartment. I shall never find my apartment. Mislabeling has made me homeless.

I am with a friend in a house I don’t know. The house is occupied by a couple I don’t know. No, that’s not right. I am seeing my dentist in a dentist office. The office is lit as if by a thousand of those giant space arms with the white stunning light that hovers over you when you get your teeth cleaned. The office is hermetically sealed white light. But, without getting my teeth examined, the office darkens and then it becomes a house I don’t know. And the couple is perhaps the dentist and his wife. The house now is dark. The light left. I have brought a sort of comb on a pole or a hairbrush on a pole and I can’t find it in the dark. The wife is beautiful but I discover she is also blind which is perhaps why the house is dark. It doesn’t matter. I think I have found my missing grooming contraption but the beautiful blind woman is miffed. She insists it is hers and of course it is. She knows by touching it. I am uncomfortable stumbling around this dark space in the home of strangers looking for my comb-on-a-pole. I never do find it. And for some reason the friend I am with is hopping mad. Was it his?

There are many more dreams like this, remembered only in shreds. And they piled on top of each other similar feelings. I was lost. I was awkward. I couldn’t find things. Everything was unfinished.

Which makes me think that I should —

SS