I am the only one wearing a mask in the bougie coffee shop that sells charcoal water in glass bottles for seven dollars.
Most other folks are working at laptops adorned with fresh stickers from local breweries. Some are clearly camped here for the day - equipped with laptop stands and battery packs, earbuds and blue blockers. Their hourly wages adequate to cover life plus $8 nitros and vegan scones on repeat.
We are here because in August I unearthed a manuscript and prayed for a way forwards. In 2019 when I thought it was in the publication pipeline, it felt 80% ready, but the fates agreed, it wasn’t my first book. Each year as it aged on a shelf it felt less ready, more naive and fractured. Fermentation cracked the through lines, rotting the threads that once held it together.
At the same time, I often read back many years on bits and nuggets I wrote when my brain had two nickels to rub together and wince at how feeble I seem to be now. I can’t tell if my writing has suffered, or if my inner critic has nibbled a biscuit fit for Alice and grown twelve times its previous size.
And fangs?
One night, after reading the relic and waffling between adoration of my cute former self and immense gratitude that the pile of words I called my ‘first book’ didn’t get far from my reach, I sat in bed wondering what the hell to do. As I almost never do, I begged myself to dream of a way forward. Not quite a prayer, but a hope that the way forward might be revealed by the wordless chambers of my mind, in images or allegories meaningful in the morning.
I rarely recall a dream unless I oversleep - then terrific and worrisome nightmares on a singular theme rouse me. I’m being chased, often through a house that is both unfamiliar and somehow mine. I cannot speak - if I reach a phone or see someone on the street below, no sound comes from my mouth. In the end, I have to stab some unknown assailant to death, which is wildly unpleasant for both of us.
This is why I get up so early; ‘sleeping in' is a war zone in my psyche.
But the next morning I had a clear memory of the cast of the previous night’s dream, even though the plot disappeared over coffee.
A friend I hadn’t seen in 25 years, but who had walked a similar path through childhood appeared in a brief but resonant way, and midway through the morning I remembered my request for a sign.
My psyche had answered.
While I could have called my mother to call his mother, instead I turned to my laptop. Google revealed a very alive and incomprehensibly close version of the human I met in the crabgrass of preKindergarten and would have sat next to at high school graduation, had I not also been playing in the orchestra. In many of our common classes, we were seated next to one another as so many public school teachers lack either creativity or care and arrange their seating charts alphabetically by last name. I’m a very late K, and he’s an early-mid L, and so we witnessed much of the 90’s side-by-side, having experienced the same odd and experimental upbringing in the 80’s.
I sent an email, to which he replied some months later. He lives a stone’s throw from the yoga studio where I have been the Director for six years. He runs past it frequently.
Naturally.
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