I lay in my mother’s bed and fell asleep, lonely. Noah came to me in the dream: a spirit, an avatar. He reached through my body and touched me—the godhead, the consciousness—for no reason other than that it was there and I needed it to be touched. I had never felt more beautiful. I awoke to find him next to me in our bed in Ypsilanti, forty miles away.

My stepmom told me to watch him and said that he was not allowed to chase the wild dogs in the living room. My brother chased them anyway. I scooped him up into my arms and scolded him.

“No, it’s okay!” he said. “My mom always lets me!”

“You silly goose! Your mom just told me that you weren’t supposed to!”

“Oh.” He tried his best to look like he was interested in something else. I laughed and covered him in kisses.

He let me carry him around the house and we delighted without smiling at all of the things inside. I could feel the love emanating from him. He was so precious, so magical, in the way that only little kids could be. I knew that he would never grow out of his magic. Seconds later, I wondered if he would die before he got a chance. It occurred to me from a source beyond that he would be fine, and I knew it was true: assurance from a being who knew much more than I. The being smiled a radiant light into me and I smiled, too.

My father’s grandpa, an entertainer, lay dying in the room my father grew up in.

“He’s trashed everything,” dad said. “Even the Moon Horse.”

The Moon Horse was a beautiful carousel horse. It was magical, but not in the way that grants wishes or takes you away to distant lands. It was magical like childhood and smiles and its nose lit up when you touched it.

I’m crying even now, just thinking about it. My dad looked like his soul would have been bruised if he were a little bit younger.

But he went back up to his boyhood room and retrieved his grandfather’s puppets before he had a chance to break them with his illness. He put on shows for my little sister (who is seventeen now, but wasn’t in the dream. She was just a little girl) that his nonno would have put on for his when he was a little boy. I had to write a paper and got upset at all of the commotion, but then felt awful. My dad, who has suffered from depression his entire life, looked so happy. I wanted to be there and feel it with him but I wasn’t.

I woke up very sad and my boyfriend woke up very angry. He’s not always himself in the morning. He yelled at me when I started to kiss him and when I turned away and cried, he made me turn back. He told me that he was so sorry and played lovely little games with me that made me feel so happy.

At a strange family function, I received a letter from my father dated May 21st, 1992: just days after I was born. “TO BE DELIVERED [AT THIS EVENT],” the envelope read in frantic cursive script, “EVEN IF SENDER IS NO LONGER ALIVE.”

The letter was sparse, but loving in the way only one written by a man who loves as much as my father could be. It was prompted by the death of a young singer which affected him even though he did not know her music. He addressed me as “Taurus” in it, as though I had not yet been named, and told me in frightened and carefully written words how much he loved me, how much a young father who is not much more than a boy himself can love his even tinier little baby: love her to shreds and love her to pieces without condition or end. I began to cry immediately. It wasn’t written for me anymore and it wasn’t written by my father. It was written for a baby girl that used to be me by a sad, suicidal young man that once was him. I wanted to keep it with me always and read it until the folds disintegrated. I wanted to remember those people forever.

The grain of the dream tore; I woke up to sunlight and the Food Network running an episode of “Unwrapped.” The letter was not in my hand. I could have cried.

I passed a very old woman on her porch and she came down from the steps, held my hand, and shared with me her wisdom as we walked together down the street that I grew up on. She had seen my post on some kind of local forum and told me all sorts of phone numbers that would be auspicious for me specifically to have. She said she had a spiritual gift with a very long name and as we walked she told me how many people were buried under the sidewalk where we stood. There were old couples and murder victims and a girl whom the woman had found dead one day with a living boy on top of her. Some of the slabs of cement had gaping cracks at the edges through which you could almost see the bodies below.
I had a throbbing headache and wanted to visit a friend at a house show she was throwing, but was also very glad to be where I was: holding hands with an old wisewoman. She knew very much about me. For some very strange reason, I wanted to kiss her.

This morning I dreamt that my boyfriend was giving all of our friends super powers. He touched me on the shoulder and I found myself with the ability to sprout feathers at will and glide anywhere at all.

I dreamt I was betrothed, to whom I do not know. It did not matter to me. In preparation for the wedding, all members of my family had abandoned all ego and id and became as bees: we had duties and rites to carry out more ancient than words. While my aunts prepared a feast and my uncles decorated a most sacred womb of the earth (somebody’s basement) with candles and colourful idols of saints, my mother and father helped me to procure the bridal ensemble. We walked only on foot to the finest tailors and cobblers in Detroit, I dressed only in pure white stockings and a Star Wars t-shirt.

The cobbler was a kindly old man who tended to my feet as if they were delicate baby animals in need of a set of beautiful bowers to call home. He promised my shoes would sparkle as was befitting to such a lovely bride, then cleaned my teeth and asked me to spit. I thought nothing of the tiny specks in the saliva that ran down the drain, but the cobbler/dentist knew better. I had oral locusts. There was no cure; nothing could kill them that would not kill me.

My mother and father ceased to be calm and started bickering immediately. My dad drove home and wouldn’t even walk me to my dress fitting. Indeed, everybody had already forgotten about the wedding, including me. It would never, ever happen. I never even wondered who my husband would have been.

Instead, I spent my days locked in the bathroom. People came to visit, but I could feel their pity and shame through the door and knew better than to let any of them in. I was dead to the world now; I would never be married and who would befriend a girl with a mouthful of pests? Day and night, I stood in front of the sink spitting out tiny bugs. They laid their eggs in my throat constantly, but if I could manage to spit out every single locust, I could be free of them forever. I cried. They were bitter, so bitter, and they stung at the insides of my mouth. I thought of my nonpareil and then forgot his name forever.

The people in the dreamscape started going through it all as if I weren’t there and, in retrospect, I guess I wasn’t. A toddler banged my bass against the ground and slobbered all over it. An old man stole all of my recyclables. A young couple, a boy and a girl, examined my jewellery in awe and anger. The girl grabbed my necklace when she came to it, a golden chain with a pendant heart. “Look at this!” she said with sadness and frustration. “She controls it all and she doesn’t even know.”

I dreamt I had a summer job at a theme park and hated it. I hated it on vague terms, at first. I knew why, but didn’t know why. I remember going in the break tent and dreading it, feeling so sick and knowing why, but I—the dreaming I—certainly had no idea why I would be so apprehensive. Then I saw. Deep in the tent, after partition upon partition, my co-workers were strapping little children into plastic suits with giant prosthetic penises and ordering them to “make their costume shake hands with the other costume,” which wasn’t a costume at all but an animal, usually a dog, in a clown suit. They would put both the child and the dog in this horrible machine, made by the same company that makes all of those carnival rides, which swung their bodies in a way that would force the prostheses in and out of the dogs’ orifices and oh my god the children would scream and scream.

I don’t usually have nightmares.

Knives come down on my throat, but I feel no need to escape or to shake myself from sleep. These are the deliberate and gentle cleavings of a blade in fruit, sweet and sumptuous and consummate. I wince, but it is a lover’s wince.

When I open my eyes, I find a boy. He is my youngest brother, he is my best friend at the age of three, he is a child I have never seen before. He is ripping apart balls of substrate I have made to feed a fungal mycelium. “Hey! Hey, buddy, stop it!” I call after him and tear him away. This mycelium is extremely important to both of us; it feeds the fungus whose fruits will feed us and always feed us in body and mind and the secret part that nobody can see. I explain this to the boy and he begins to cry with guilt. I pick him up and hold him close to me with shush and comfort. We need each other. I have taken care of him for a long time.

When he falls asleep, I survey the damage. I come closer to the substrate balls and I see that they are also little animals—furry and ratlike—precious babies curled around themselves in sleep or in death. I gasp and tears well in my eyes. They are the quintessence of life, revealed only to me and this little boy, revealed only under the shroud of dream. My heart swells, I love them so much. I love them as parent and child and equal; I love them as brother and sister and god. I feel no need to hold them, not only because my arms are full with my boy but because I hold them always. They are me and we are we and everything in the world is us, all connected in love and need and kisses in the ether.

The knives have never stopped. I wonder what I am for. I tell myself that I will remember this when I wake, but I almost don’t.