In this dream, I am standing on the sidewalk in front of that old Victorian house.

The sun has just dipped below the horizon and the ground is still emanating the memory of it’s warmth. I am young, but not so young that that warmth doesn’t carry slivers of my whole life in it. The slivers flit around my feet like little fish and I look down and wait for one to bite my ankle.

There. There’s one.

Run with the fishes.

THE SEA OF CORTEZ

I am a child.

I am standing on the beach in Mexico and my grandmother is showing me how to find Venus. Mars. She is teaching me about the moon—how it waxes and weans and about how sometimes, we are like that too. Dim one moment and luminous the next. Small and slight some days, large and commanding on others.

She is eating ice cream. She is not supposed to be doing that, and I love her for it. It is late at night and the air is so warm that it feels criminal. It feels like cheating. It feels like you could stay up forever and the earth would hold you in her embrace, never sending a chill down your spine. There was never a reason to sleep. The Sea of Cortez was far too violent to ever let you anyway. It crashed and thrashed all night long. The tide would swell to an impossible magnitude, collecting itself, sucking anything in it’s path right back into it’s merciless embrace. And then, finally, it would crash down louder than you ever thought water could sound and shoot out with a powerful whoosh over the course sand.

It was not an ocean you could swim in. Tourists tried all the time and they died for it. It was one you simply had to marvel at, feeling the great expanse of the world and how tiny and disposable your being was in the face of it. I loved it for that. It was alive.

JULY, JULY SKY

I look back up to the sky but I am not in Mexico anymore. I am a teenager, floating on my back in that swimming pool.

I have not spoken to my grandmother in a very long time and I have not heard the waves crashing on the shoreline of Mexico in even longer. But it is not what affects me. I am staring into the July sky, feeling the intense wrath of it’s heat beating down on my already sun-kissed shoulders. There is not a sound. There is only the smooth indifference of an empty sky, filled with nothing but hot air and memories. I am seventeen. I am on the edge of one world and the precipice of another but a pandemic has pressed pause on the whole thing.

So I am floating. I am floating on my back in limbo in that swimming pool, feeling time stand very still. I think I am a ghost. Someone has stopped the world from spinning for just one moment and we are all floating aimlessly through it like astronauts in space, trying to hold onto the tether that connects us to the world we knew and long more than anything to return safely to.

That is what that summer was like. I just wanted to feel the ground again.

A WORLD AWAY

The ground is warm.

I am outside, reading Charles Dickens and Zadie Smith under the palm trees of my college campus. I am eating an avocado sandwich and sipping an iced coffee while I wait for my next lecture. I am so happy. I am stupidly, intoxicatingly in love with my studies. With papers, discussions, presentations. I go to class and listen to my professors wax poetic about how this author or that one completely subverted the cultural norms of heteronormative bourgeois society and it lights my skin on fire. It is so cool.

But I can still hear it. The tapping of the palm fronds against the window panes of those rooms and how I used to look at them and long for a place far away.

I dreamed of a world that was dreaming of me. If the dimensions of time crunched, if I folded just these two along the dotted line, then I am here and she is there and we can almost reach out and touch one another. There is a whole life waiting on the other side of the country for her but she doesn’t know it yet. I know so many things that she doesn’t, and how can you not feel an aching chasm of separation from that person that you were when you come to realize a thing like that. I feel so much older than I was and it was not so long ago.

It has barely been any time at all. I am 20, squinting my eyes at the sun.

I sip an iced latte and fall through time.

EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE

My hands are cupping a hot coffee. There’s a banana yellow taxi bussing down the street and someone is trying desperately to hail it. My life is that taxi and I am someone.

I am 22 years old but I am also 8, 17, and 20. The leaves are slowly browning around the edges, melting into hues of orange and lemon and ruby red apple and I have never seen anything so dramatic. It’s fall. It’s fall and I am walking down the streets of New York but I am also standing on the shores of Mexico and floating on my back in California and listening to lectures in college. I am every place all at once, every self rolled into one. He reaches for my hand and I see my life flash before my eyes. Past, present, and future swirl around me like the falling leaves. It is everything, all at once.

Life is a dream, a trip through time, a stumble and a fall.

And in this dream, I am five years old. I am standing on the sidewalk in front of that old Victorian house. The sun has just dipped below the horizon and the ground is still emanating the memory of it’s warmth.

I am young, but not so young.

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