That was her dream. And when she woke up, she was in the middle of a moss-filled pond on a bed of lily pads. No, she woke up in her bedroom. But her sheets were green and she imagined they were lily pads. And so they were.
She sat up and rubbed the sand from her eyes that an unknown man had scooped into them while she was dreaming. Usually he’d only put one spoonful in each eye, but this time it seems like he was being extra generous. Maybe he was flirting. She figured she was probably delirious, but rubbing her eyes felt good, and so that morning she did it for longer.
The clouds outside her window started to take form, and then the rain came, and because of the bad infrastructure in her building, her ceiling leaked in only one spot. It wasn’t enough to cause any damage but it was like Chinese water torture and the methodical dripping felt too monotonous. And she hated anything dull, especially pencils and pathetic fallacies.
She only used pens. Which she had already packed two of in her backpack for the day. Everyday. She thought she’d use one now to write down her dream. Zipping open the largest pouch, she reached inside and pulled out a recycled notebook and one of her two black pens.
Flipping for an empty sheet, the old pages caught the tip of her index finger, delicately slicing the epidermis she learned about in biology, at a 9th grade level, just last week. A bright red droplet pooled on the surface of her pale skin and she loved the contrast of the colors. It was beautiful. She considered sucking the wound, but instead she located the empty page and pressed the finger down; firmly at first, but then gliding it across the slightly yellowing pages like a circus flying trapeze act: with the greatest of ease. She wrote, “happy” in her blood. Everyone knows anything you seal in blood is committed to truth and memory. Maybe she was.
But it was too bad she didn’t write down her dream before the blood ran dry because she’d forgotten it at this point.
She thought again about lily pads and how she’d never actually seen one because she lived in an apartment building in New York. She thought about how she wished she could remember her dream. But then she thought about living in a crossover state and marrying the sandman. He’d leave little bits of himself in her field of vision every day when she woke up. Perhaps she’d be so distracted every morning that she’d never remember her dreams. But even if she did, that would be more than fine; because no one ever expects anything from someone in a crossover state.
