The Stars and the Cookie Jar

I've been fighting my dreams since I was old enough not to want to remember; usually I lose. I got through freshman and sophomore years of college through the assiduous application of supervised pharmaceuticals (and gods, that walk to Mailman was a bitch) and when, after medical trouble in my junior year, I could no longer take them, I just started keeping really weird hours.

Grownup-me, in Chicago, slept with the desk lamp on. Always. At all times. Fear no earthly darkness, because there's none of it in the apartment.

Kraada has had a deft hand in ridding me of my nightmares, since then, and it's gotten to where I no longer have the old set  -- the ones from my childhood -- at all. It is a huge mercy.

But once a week, maybe, I wake up with the sheets off the bed, with memories of strange things, the kind of images in ultra-relief you only get in dreams. Linear, usually. Here's to being a storyteller even in sleep.

Tonight -- this morning? -- I was back in that ballroom, pounding with all my weight at the doors, Out, out, let us out.

My mother, hearing of it later, I remember, was skeptical; but we had my companion packed out of Saybrook (bloody walkup, bloody triple) by before-dark the next day. And you don't pack it in on your education like that, not unless. Not unless.