::fragments::

A long involved episode in which I was starring in a play, but I didn't have lines memorized and I lost my schedule of when I was supposed to be at rehearsals and when I was supposed to arrive on opening night. I found out I was in the play only two nights before opening. Melanie was also in the play. She seemed to have the schedule. She was disappointed I didn't.

My father ran into Melanie's mom's car on the 170 freeway and they all drove up and parked in front of my mom's house. Everyone was very disappointed with my father. He kind of hung his head but had a drunk smirk on his face. That pissed me off more.

Omar and I were making out, which amazed me, because we don't have those kinds of feelings about each other. I enjoyed it nonetheless (though I occasionally pulled away and looked at him questioningly because I could not understand why this was happening).

Lots of monsters and disembodied hands reaching through walls. My mother's house. Repeating the 23rd Psalm over and over and still the scaly monster's claws would reach in to the bathroom to try and grab me or the white cat.

(1) AQ and I were in a department store looking at the same jacket. It was denim, with a beautiful blood-red flower design on the back on a silky fabric.

(2) I was meandering around the department store, keeping my eye on the jacket, while also keeping my eye on Ronnie, who had formerly been AQ.

(3) I saw my mother, who asked me a series of annoying questions until I burst out, Can you stop asking me so many questions??

(4) Ronnie had purchased the jacket. I called across the store to her to confirm. She was holding it in her grasp. When I went to the rack, there were no more left like it.

(5) I decided to busy myself with looking for things that would be good for living in a camper. Travel items.

(6) I was looking at a display of Carrie's photos in the department store. I pointed them out to my mother. They were black and white prints of rocks in a forest, with animals on them: two rabbits (one I recognized as Carrie's), mice, fireflies. As we held a print, the print came to life and there was a snap of dust in the air as the animals moved. We both gasped in surprise and I laughed.

1.
The United States had closed all of its borders. I was on the east coast somewhere, near the border of Canada. I was in a hotel room when I found out. I was traveling with a tall skinny man with blond curly hair. There was a government man in a blue suit, Caucasian, who was in charge of a large group of people. Apparently they sent out men like this to calm large crowds. He told us that we could not leave the country and, in fact, we could not go anywhere but the immediate area.

The crowd protested amongst itself. We could not believe this turn of events. I was awestruck. I said aloud, Perhaps we can go underwater and declare water sovereign. I was half-joking.

Lots happened in-between, but then I recall being at the Canadian border. A woman, Canadian, was reading a prepared statement telling us why we could not cross the border. The way her mouth was while she read it was suspicious; it was clear she had not written the statement herself. A number of us in the crowd protested her outright. There was a small sense of panic. I contemplated what I would do--I imagined setting fires, burning my way out of the country. It felt like there was no way out and it was getting scarier.

2.
Patches of my skin were three shades lighter than normal, all over my body. I looked at myself in a full-length mirror and wondered why these patches were like this. I was more surprised than scared.

I was in my grandmother's house on Euclid. I was talking to a group of people (they seemed randomly chosen from my waking life) about how special Pat is to me, how I've cherished him in my life, and a few moments later, Pat walked in the front door, smiling and unaware of my monologue about him.

Earlier or later, Stephen's friend Mike from the bay area handed me a rat. It was a nice little sweet rat, like the kind Ren had. Still, I thought it was a strange gift. Later, I spied a coffin-looking container that held what I was told was a half-eaten man. I could see lots of big, huge, sewer rats feeding on him. It felt very creepy.

Last night I reread some dream journals of two years ago exactly to the date. Back then I was dreaming a lot about rabbits. The rabbits are still here, as are the rats and other sundry creatures.

Stephen and I had plane tickets. We were in a cabin somewhere on the east coast. It seemed that everytime I checked my watch, the flight was only an hour away and we weren't even packed. I called a man with a Middle Eastern accent each time I wanted to change my flight. I did it three times. I could tell he was getting exasperated. I called my mother and asked if she could meet us at the cabin and get us to the airport because I had postponed our flight again until the next morning.

Later, I was walking through some woods and a rural community. I was being very affectionate with a woman who resembled a Heather I once knew, only she was taller, thinner. I asked her if she could move anywhere she wanted to live in Olympia, would she go back and move there. She didn't know what I meant. We were hugging and petting and I said, Well, if you always wanted to move to the westside, would you? She just laughed.

Lots of images of Ren and I, a reuniting, standing around outside an unfamiliar cafe, reminiscing, coming together, holding one another, trying to be discreet about the feelings still between us while strangers looked on. He was wearing strange glasses like Stephen's, and he was smoking, which I found very perplexing.

Earlier, Melanie and I were looking around for a place to be alone in an unfamiliar upper floor of a house--maybe a brightly lit attic?, to be intimate. And we weren't doing a very good job of it.

Nikki C. and I were in an unfamiliar house. Missa S.'s boyfriend had murdered Missa. I explained afterward that he like a blank spot to me--I couldn't remember his face at all and therefore was not a good witness. Nikki leaned Missa's body against a low brick wall and later when the police arrived, we found that the body had decomposed, separating her legs from the rest of her. I saw her legs, stiff and straight, separate from her torso.

Before the police had arrived, Nikki and I had moments of anxiety, outbursts of sobbing.

Later, I was in some kind of war scene. It looked like images I've seen on television of Iraq. I was with Pat, Melanie, and some others. A small tuxedo cat and a dog were also part of our group. We literally decided to all run into the fray together. We sprinted through the chaos. I was incredibly frightened, hearing gunfire, seeing little boys throw molotov cocktails, and I saw one boy try to set fire to an electrical wire that was coming down. We had to run under live wires and jump low barricades and past fire. We found a shack, that was presumably ours. I saw the top part of Missa's body, but it was just skin. It was like a costume of her skin, her face just a mask. Someone in the room, a woman, freaked out and said she never wanted to lay eyes on that again. I didn't want to get rid of it, because I viewed it as evidence, so I buried it under a pile of clothes and plastic dry-cleaning bags in a corner of the shack.

I was feeling very scared and growing more anxious. I was sad for the little cat that had accompanied us on our journey. She was fast asleep, exhausted from all the chaos. I whistled her awake and tried to find scraps for her to eat. I felt anxious at the thought of losing her and how little she was and how I was going to keep track of her or care for her. At that moment, I became conscious of the fact that this was only a dream and I began to force myself awake, so I wouldn't feel that sadness anymore.

I was riding on a plane to the east coast with my mother, but the weird thing was that there was no body of the plane--we were merely sitting in seats with nothing around us. I wondered how it would affect us, but no one else seemed concerned.

Later, I was on the trip I'd been heading towards. Saw the Heeter family. Watched them play baseball in front of the cottage we were staying in. The view from the front porch was of the most amazing mountains, snow-covered, and I wondered if I could hike down into the valley and up the mountain, and how long it would take. I watched a hiker heading up the mountain from afar.

Back in the cottage, I was in charge of a toddler whom I didn't recognize...

My grandmother and I were in my mother's living room. There were three cats in the room with us. We were looking out at the patio and I was trying to count all the cats--I'd start counting but another would appear and I'd lose count. They were all different colors and relatively the same size--adult cats.

Finally I counted 12 cats, 15 in all including the ones rubbing against our calves in the living room. (I woke up in the middle of the night from this dream, smiling and giggling--which is highly unusual--)

The setting was a large old house in Olympia that I've never seen before. It was painted white with a light green trim. I parked my bicycle, which was heavy with bags, outside the front door. Inside there was a line--it was a restaurant, like a buffet, and the women who were running it were women I remember as older Olympia Food Co-op personnel. I understood that this was their new business venture. One of them said hello to me. I got anxious about my bike while I was waiting in line. I went out to lock it. I was handed a teacup, white and elegant, of soup. I walked down a couple of stairs, noticing the carpet was a pleasing light green color and there was a fireplace and living room below. The sliding glass door revealed a beautiful little lawn space with white iron lawn furniture.

I was in Santa Cruz with some young men, some of whom reminded me of boys I hung out with when I was a teenager. The had black t-shirts and were mostly poorly behaved. I got a call on my cell phone as I was standing next to a pool, and I was thinking of where I might have packed my swimsuit as the men circled the pool talking and laughing. The phone call was from Teresa. She instantly began talking in her excited voice and asked me did I know what I would be doing on a certain weekend (April 30?) and she asked me in a way that seemed to suggest she already had a plan for me in mind.

She was celebrating her birthday that weekend and wanted very much for me to be there (her birthday is actually in August). I listened, kind of amused and also touched, because she sounded like she was interested in talking to me, reconnecting, and willing to put energy into a new relationship with me. All the while I was still trying to consider what to wear to go swimming.

I finally asked her if I could call her back, I was traveling. She agreed.

Later, I was in a car with Katie. She was driving and I noticed her driving was becoming very slow and dangerous. She drove us down the side of a short cliff and I calmly said, Do you want me to drive? even though I was actually very scared, having seen the nose of the car dip into nothingness, and she said yes. When we got to the road at the bottom, she drove a little further to find a place to park on the side of the road in the dust, and we switched positions. I became the driver. Then I woke up.

Walking in Paris, though it was a waterfront. At night. Looking to buy a camera. There was a special celebration due to the sky. I saw ten moons in a pattern like a rainbow, curved, across the sky, each moon in a different phase of moon-ness. Nikki C. was with me and we were laughing, crying and gleeful at the spectacle: fish, fire, all sorts of other colorful bizarre images leapt from one moon into the other until it had all jumped into the last moon, extinguishing it.

Elton John behind me at an outdoor pub, being ill. I did not want to turn to look.

Still in Paris, in an apartment I had recently moved into. I could not get the door to close--there were two. Katie walked by and saw me struggling. Me, with my pink silky robe falling open and nothing underneath. A woman across the hall, African-American, saw me struggling. I was trying to fit the two doors together like a puzzle. My robe continually fell open as I tried to work these doors. The woman helped me, only then the door was too small for the doorway. She then offered me a plate of food, which turned out to be a pair of green and yellow striped gloves, fried.

Later: I was in a large concrete building with the director of the library. There was one glass wall, huge. The building completely turned on its side and the shaking began. We ran. I wanted to stop in a doorway but none seemed safe. It stopped. The earthquake was over. We were unharmed.

What famous person did I meet and talk to? I think it was in Paris...