At Least I Sleep Through the Night

I dreamed we found the figure skater you told me about, and we watched her fly over the ice in an arena that was half-rink, half-stage. She was so young, younger than you'd said she was, and though she was charming, she couldn't match the adults who came after her in grace. "She won't be able to cash in on being a child much longer," I said. "She'll have to gain more skill to rely on." You nodded, sadly.

I dreamed there was a three-story house where a lonely old woman lived. It was falling down around her, but she was too frightened of her own memories to leave it. I tried to repair it for her, but my efforts only brought the walls down on us. Then he arrived, no doors to keep him out, and I learned what she had been afraid of. She told me it would do no good to fight, or to scream. I did both anyway.

I dreamed of all the gods from all the stories gathered in one place for a battle that would finish most of them. I was there, too, but they sent me away. There was no place for me there, they said. But since I couldn't go home, they made a new world for me, where I was someone else and everyone around me had the heads of animals. It wasn't what I wanted, but as the kind man with the lion head led me through shimmering curtains and candlelit tents, I remember thinking, "I could be happy here."

I dreamed the words tattooed on my wrist were disappearing one by one. I smeared my skin with ink from a blue ballpoint pen as I tried to write them in again, but I couldn't remember what they had been. Every new word I tried was wrong, and all the combinations were wrong-- God, they had been important, I knew that, but they were leaving me, leaving me, and I couldn't remember why.