A dream.
Someone opens a door and steps out into the hallway. A character presents himself to me from a light wood-colored door at the end of the hallway of periwinkle blue and almost olive green wallpaper of an intricate, indiscernible pattern. At the end of the hallway is a bright window and through it an obscure city-scape and the intimation of an ultra-clear sky. The door opens and he silently emerges, this as-of-yet nameless character, and he pauses mid-stride as if he were startled by something. I am behind the wallpaper, and it seems he is looking for me, the unseen seer, and I think "Is he coming to report himself to me?"
At first I guess that he is I, aged decades, emerging from my cloister into the hallway of my own invention, pausing, distracted as I cross the threshold, feeling something, and involuntarily searching for the source of that feeling in the minutiae of the olive wallpaper and its intermingling lines. He is all but bald with tufts of white hair about his scalp and ears, his face is pinkish and shaved cleanly and he is wearing glasses. He emerges from his wood-colored portal, and what is behind that portal I have only hints of: a brown, thick carpet, a darkly stained table with an open book on it, a couch with a depression on the left cushion. Other than that darkness, oblivion. I am frightened at the possibility that he is I, and that I am realizing in that startled moment that I am being watched by myself. But I am the eyes of the wallpaper; he stops and stares into my eyes and I see that he is not I. He is a character that came to me from oblivion in the monstrous apartment complex in my dream, a monster himself, and a ghost, but he is not frightening in the least.
Another dream.
I am walking a street from my youth, the one where a lake sits above the ground and lily pads and reeds obscure the elevated water.
Katherine Anne is sitting on a bench outside of a small, white building. She is at a small, white table. Her brown hair is blowing in the breeze. We do not speak, but she returns my gaze. The paint is peeling in little ragged white petals from the table in front of her and on it is a child's game, a box with plastic colored blocks on pegs to allow them to spin. On each side of the blocks are letters and numbers, a different color for each letter and each number. When spun they form different words and combinations of numbers, possibly dates.
I become distracted and peer down the road past the elevated lake. The road loses itself in a thick green forest beyond, and beyond that I know is the home I grew up in. The forest is bright, the light is golden on the limbs as it is on an early summer evening and all around me is still and silent.
