Lately I sleep on my back, with my chin tipped up, or flat on my stomach, head curled into the mattress. Lately I sleep without moving. When I wake up, there is a map of heat on the bed, the fingerprints of my manic body temperature coiled in the cotton. If I move, I can feel it under my palm, warm like a living thing: this feverish shadow of mine.
I dreamt it was snowing. I dreamt of twin holocausts, one great and one small. I dreamt that I was keeping score on the back of an envelope, that we took for granted each other’s laughter. In dreams, everything is a spider web, and anything you think leap frogs its electrical pulse down those sticky threads, creates its own logic. There’s room for everything — my fourth grade classroom, an icy fire escape, the people I love in a steady world. It all makes sense and thought is action. If I think September in the rain, 1994, then everything is red and brown and wet, and if I think city snow, then it’s New York and I’m in college, and if I think both at once, then both things can happen at once, without any fuss.
It’s only in this world that I have to untwine it all. There are fewer people in this world, fewer chances. When I wake up and lay my hand over the fever I’ve mapped to cotton, I remember: place, time, self. And no matter how many times I think September in the rain, I am just here, in this strange bed, alone save for the heat I can still feel radiating from the place I used to be.
–
Carolyn Nash
writes here
and you can follow her on Twitter.
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