There are laptops everywhere throughout the various hotel rooms I'm flitting around in. I'm on a work trip and in between designing web layouts I work on my book. This feels like waking life. Then someone robs my hotel room and I'm devastated because I didn't back up my writing to the cloud. I try to track its whereabouts on my phone. The tracker tells me it has been thrown into the Indian Ocean. I'm convinced someone close to me has done this.
I am hanging out at my sister's house in Minnesota. My co-worker is there. I am working on a song, singing softly with my guitar, she tells me to stop. "Those lyrics are bad. Let me do the wordsmithing. I know pens. I know paper." She begins to deconstruct my lyrics and makes up some of her own. They are much better than mine. I feel hurt, a bit like a failure. She attempts to help my niece Sarah out of her wheelchair in a harried, uncaring way. I tell her to please stop and help Sarah out of the chair myself. Sarah smiles and hums. She puts her hand on my shoulder. Her sweetness obliterates all of my insecurities, all of my fears too.
