Dream Going upstairs, sleeping in a room of a very nice and large house. Prepping for a flight within an hour or two, Tia Sandra comes upstairs to ensure I’m ready to go. She was hosting? Uncle Anthony is here too; shortly after explaining how I need to get ready, she leaves. She’s Titi Lucy now, the bed has a desktop computer on it that is open for me to review. Uncle Anthony is Tio Manuel, he waits for Lucy to leave the room and looks at me. A gun in his mouth, he shoots himself and the bullet goes out the back of his head, through the computer. Somehow alive, he looks at the computer, then at me, “ahhh I didn’t mean to do THAT” and is dead again. There are guards, and the house has also changed. I am still in a large nice home, but another. Stone, warmth, reminiscent of the Dominican Republic; The air is warm and there are entirely open areas of the home. Window spaces but not windows; luxury of another kind. My instinct is to go to his desk and look around, so I’m in his office now and keep looking for something. All the compartments of his desk seem to have nothing special. Pens, a ruler, trinkets that look unspecial, something that makes it easy to hold a smaller pencil in your hand and write. I take a ruler of some kind, metal, sleek, and hide it. His colleagues begin to file into the room (5?7?), doing similar and I’m frustrated by their nosiness. They dig through trash, through the desk, scavengers. Titi Lucy returns and tells people there will be a memorial service of sorts. She is barely holding it together and people stop their scavenging. She says she has to go now, does, and I continue to monitor for thieves among the scavengers. Frustrated I tell them, “ I thought you were all good upstanding Christians, but look at you” two women of the crowd take offense and scowl; godless, are you? I shake my head, ashamed of my breaking character, ashamed for them, I leave the office and find myself on a campus of sorts. Why is everyone so young? Students everywhere formed into smaller cliques. It occurs to me that in some ways, schools and prison yards function the same way. Social capital. Social status. Impressions and intimidations. There are smoking groups, but so distinct; not bound by substance, but by something else and the substance eases their ability to bind. Removes the conflicting parts of the identities somehow. I wander and don’t find a group. There are people playing with a ball; it feels juvenile, but they’re not smoking and seem happier than us (Myself and the smokers, I mean). I walk down one of the hallways, confined like the passage tunnels connecting different train lines; the underground NYC subway transfer from the F to the 123 but relying on the natural light of the school courtyard we were just on. The ball follows down the tunnel/hallway and a few people run by to get it. I spot a guy I remember from working at a fruit stand in Madison; Jortz is kind as ever, focused on what needs doing but friendly and honest. “Your face; I remember you but can’t place it” Hi Jortz “Ahh, okay right. Of course” understanding but no mention of name. Why bother, when the understanding is more important than the label for it. A few others begin To rush by chasing further after the ball. Other fruit stand workers cycle, no names, just recognition and joy. I thought for sure these tunnel/hallways (tunnelways?) would be a place to be hurt or killed. They’re actually where people avoid the hurt they’ve felt; worse than cigarettes here. Not marijuana. Sitting down now, others discuss their past issues in a sort of passing turn. Light from the courtyard like lowest setting on a bulb dimmer. A girl talks about the shit falling out of her, after two men raped her. She laughs about how she didn’t shit herself really, there was just no way to hold it in and the smell stopped them for her. She laughs and a few others laugh too. I realize that the pain of it can’t be breached and she wouldn’t want someone to anyway. I realize I’ve always wanted my pain breached because I’ve always felt alone and so I’ve tried to provide that breaching force for others, thinking they’d like someone to crack through it “tell me about pain”. I’m not sure what it is. It’s the part that stayed coherent across the dream; watcher, not actor. Observer but not feeler. Archivist, not activist. Jortz was other. Titi Lucy was other. Tia Sandra was other. Always other. Always not self. The thought spins a bit into how myself is a selfish thing, how is love not self but also requires the self. Here is the dogma of love; the more you are yourself, the less you can be Us; but Us requires two or more self’s in order to become an Us. You are forced then, to keep a balance in things; know that there must be wolves in Yellowstone park if we’re to have rivers and green grass. There is no love in a vacuum; the push pull is the act of love; the selfishness and selflessness is also love. The loss of that mutual selfishness is where love begins to fail. Remember that you will need to be selfless for your selfishness to be copacetic. Thinking on it; there is a divinity to love. As there is with anything else that humans attempt to create: visual art, music, writing, cooking, coding, all attempts at creation. All seeking to catalyze experience and communicate an idea inside to a body outside.