I suddenly started and could not stop thinking of you. It was intrusive. I spent minutes staring at my friend feed to see what you were listening to and believing, deeply, that you could see me on the other end.  These things are not retractable. I cannot hide from them but I also cannot explain them with perfect linear direction. I know you watch me You watch me. You watch me. Or you feel me. I have very little left in my life.  Fire is magic. Dissolution is magic. Lust is magic. What’s more, they say truth and love are magic.  I was thinking of you and dreaming of you constantly and wanted nothing at all to do with you ever again. 

I laid curled on the carpet, my forehead touching my knees.  My yoga mat was beneath me. Some efforts had been made to hush myself but I was not in pose but a pleading locution that you would see me again. I would demand it. I wanted to immediately rectify some minor transgression that had taken place, but was never clear on what it was I did or if I did anything.  We both shared this edge; this tension that held us in a cloud. I had known about the power of intention, the power of symbolism and mythology for much longer than I could verbalize. I’m not the best writer or orator when I am rushed. I discovered blue alyssum was the karmic blessing of all witches and being drawn to the violet shades already, I closed my eyes and sent you a bouquet. I made my own declaration and then demanded my amends. Within seconds, I was overcome with a feeling of severe fatigue. I needed to lie down. It was about 3:30 pm, Saturday. I never nap. I rarely rest. I have double walks day. It is unusual for me to take the time to go to sleep during the day. I was still in a phase where lack of productivity meant failure but I could not keep my eyes open. I could not stay standing. I had to lie down. I could not stay awake. It felt like I was eating fields of poppy. I was passing out. I got up from the mat to climb into bed, pulled the covers over my face and within minutes was knocked out. Not only knocked out, but within minutes I was already dreaming.

I was taken to a house full of women. Someone told me the rest of their family was coming. I asked nothing of anyone the entire time. This house felt very familiar but I had never once been inside. The people felt familiar though I had never met them. I peeked out the window and saw it was snowing. There were lights in the distance; a small town. We were, what appeared to be, nowhere. I circled the house and saw my mother in bed. I felt the presence of someone else’s goddess. Someone I was borrowing to understand myself better. Yemaya. I was using her because I was scared of what I opened with Lilith and was trying to find a way back home. I passed the same door several times without noticing it. I needed to retrieve something. Show me my dragonfly. I stared at the wooden paneling on the wall. It was that cheap wooden paneling people use to pretend they have a house made out of wood.  But it was plastic. It was all plastic. I didn’t have to touch it to know it was linoleum– brown linoleum and oddly, covering real wood. I was standing in front of a pile of toys. Well, they weren’t toys so much as trinkets or totems for others, I suppose.

In some cruel gesture the owner of the house had purchased real wooden decorations that a child would long for but couldn’t derive real joy from playing. They didn’t have that bend, that softness that young children need to enjoy their fantasy games. You couldn’t move the pieces, couldn’t twist them, chew on the legs of the wooden dolls, couldn’t feel it. Really, they were all geometric blocks of wood in a pile and fake wooden walls to cover the real wood underneath. All brown blocks of wood, decorative logs, next to a brown wall so everything blended together. Good trickster. Nothing flew past me. My guide lay lifeless. I saw the pillared wings, I saw the little tail. A wooden dragonfly in the middle of the pile resembling a tiny stick. Probably hand carved, probably the work of someone with delicacy, a meticulous eye.  I turned my head and a little blond girl’s hand appeared from nowhere and showed me the knob on the door that I could barely see the five times I circled that small house full of people. I asked no one where I could get some fresh air. I asked no one why it was all women. I asked nothing of anyone the entire time.

I opened the door and if this had been a moment in history in my flesh form, full body and palpable, standing and seeing what had transformed in my small demure act of keeping quiet and holding a violet bouquet between us, I would have broken. I would have teared. I would have approached you. But I took in the scene. It had been less than a year since I visited that same cabin in the woods. Only then it had been full of wolves and I had been resentful that you were so much like me but denying it all the time. That there is something here. It was the same cabin and it lit up from the inside as if someone was home. I did not approach it. I did not go inside either. I watched. Surrounding it, where there had once been wolves, the yard was now full of glittering golden does. What’s more, there was not a buck in sight.

“The dream of the cabin–1/7/2017”