I'm in NY with someone who seems like a friend, but also like a stranger. She is showing me around her neighborhood. We take the subway deep into Brooklyn and check out "her favorite" small bookshop. I see a book in the non-fiction cart that I tell her I've been meaning to read. It's by Marco Polo and it's called something like Experimental Life and Peaceful Physics. I notice the book costs 7.99.
I'm in a place that looks like a combination of Taormina, Sicily and Denver, Colorado - specifically Colfax avenue right in front of Casa Bonita restaurant. I am waiting in line to get into what could be a carnival. It's a warm summer night and there are lots of people wandering around looking relaxed and happy. I notice a man yelling at one of the staff from the sidewalk. I need to use your bathroom he says over and over again. I worry about him and think of the kid in my second grade class - Kenny from China - who repeatedly asked Ms. Eddy to use the bathroom and never heard him. He peed his pants all over the sidewalk and had to sit in his wet jeans the rest of the day. Too late the man says as the staff worker motions him inside to use the bathroom. He walks towards me, then away from me, and I notice his black pants are wet. He covers his butt with his long coat and walks away. I think he has the perfect attire for wetting himself and getting away with it and wonder whether or not he has a bladder problem.
There are two girls in the woods behind a combination of my childhood house in the mountains of Colorado and to the setting of an eery French film I haven't seen before. A soundtrack to this film is playing. One girl runs into the woods and discovers the skeleton of a cat. Then she finds a t-rex skull. I am now one of the young girls and we try to put the bones in the trunk of a car. The music continues to play.
I'm working at an old job that I find boring. The people are nice, but I'm always done with my work too soon and have too much down time. So I draw in a sketchbook. The drawings looks like psychedelic sketches from when I was a teenager. They aren't very good at all and when my coworkers find my sketch books they tell me so. They ask me why I would be sketching bad sketches instead of working and I tell them I've finished my work. I tell them that my job bores me and that there is usually too much down time. My boss asks if I want this to be my last day. I shrug my shoulders and say I guess, thinking about the fact that I have no other income whatsoever and panic a bit about my lack of savings. Still, there is a freedom in my decision and I head home and look for my guitar. I bring the guitar to a coworker's house that night. Alot of my coworkers are there, but in this environment I feel like I barely know anyone at all. They all have instruments and we begin to play music. It sounds delightful, harmonious and in sync and I feel thrilled to be part of it. I panic a bit about work again, but find a freedom in the strings of my guitar. I go outside onto a porch that is perched over a deep, roiling ocean. It's dark and there are two attractive young men sitting there ignoring me. I grab onto the swing and climb on. My former boss comes with me. She seems peeved by the fact that I've come over to the house and want to use her ocean swing. Still she allows it. She floats around me as I hang onto the swing with two arms, flying over the deep, dark, ocean. I cling onto the bar of the swing with two hands and hope I don't fall off. I return to the porch and see a version of my husband standing there. He's a young man. He seems annoyed that I've all of a sudden decided to swing and play guitar. I feel a new level of independence and freedom, and the fear is almost all gone.
