… but my dreams have always been a problem, see. I have very vivid, often disturbing dreams. See.

In my dreams, dead people come back to life and take me for rides in balloons, exes ask me for help piling hay in their garages, in my dreams I have sex with the boss, and then the boss' daughter just for good measure, and I write, and I sing, and I dance, and drink, and steal. I mold clay into folds of skin, and I stir cauldrons of flowers. I smile as much as is needed, and I love as much as I want, I never escape punishment and I always get to say good-bye, sometimes more than once.

And I love. Oh, how I love in my dreams...

And so the onslaught of understanding begins, like lightningbugs crawling in the palm of my hand. I stay up as late as I can, to avoid it, but then I sleep, and I dream, dream, dream, and no amount of my pretending will make these things go away now. I talk to the Boy, who knows too well. I talk to the Girl, who knows almost nothing, but who wants to know more, somehow, who is new and shiny and cute as a thousand and one hummingbirds.

They try to keep me rooted but really, if I let myself remember, I am lost.

. . .

We left suddenly. We moved to a tiny, hot, old apartment overgrowing with vines, in a building buckling under time. From the outside, I came to understand upon arriving with my assigned box of stuff, the place looked a bit like the Flatiron building. It had aged well, I was given to understand, by the tour guide with the ridiculous blue paper hat.

Inside, there was cooking. There were saucepans on the stove, and on the counters, and on the radiator in the hall, and in the living room, all of them bubbling and popping incessantly with this and that flavor and odor and sound. I stirred, and I ran from one to the next, wooden spoon hanging in mid-air like a doctor arrived at the scene of a collapse. "Let me through, I must stir!" I kept declaring, and the masses of people would part for me, mothers and fathers and great-grandfathers and cousins of aunts of godfathers. People, in that dream, waited patiently, occasionally smirking at my incessant attempts at troop movement. "You," I would point. "You sit there. You come over here," I'd point to a child, and then "You, you hold this." Halfway through the night, I found myself doing the laundry, by hand, in the toilet, flush-rinsing it and wringing it out on the edge of the tub. This means nothing, I remember thinking, this means nothing, it's just a matter of expedience, don't read too much into it, you gotta have clean panties, you've just got to, the dream me told the dreaming me, and pointed to the back door.

The back door was a flimsy bamboo-stick job, barely hanging on its hinges, just to the right of the refrigerator. I stepped out through it, curious about such a small place that would even consider a backdoor, and was faced with the bottom end of a wide, safe stairway that headed upward to my right into... into nothingness. As far as I could tell, the stairs went on forever. Directly across, on my step so to speak, was the bright, shiny, linoleum-clad entrance to a supermarket. Six check-out lanes stood open, their check-out girls at attention, fingers poised over their cash-register keys. A goddess, the goddess of shopping emerged from between the aisles and beckoned to me, smiling. "Come," she said, "Let me show you what we have for you," and she led the sweating, sauce-splattered, smelly me into the neon-laden plastic goodness of the place. "Look!" she said, and there it was: the Everything. Every aisle, every corner, every shelf full of all the good things I wanted, clear LED lights, control panels with Perfectly Designed Interfaces and shiny metal knobs. I stopped, and appreciated, and stroked the shiny new aluminum saucepans with the copper bottoms and Natural Non-Stick Surface goodness, and I cried. "Would you like a moment?" the perfect-looking woman asked, and I said "Yes, I'd like to wander. May I?" "Of course," she inclined her head, "of course, we'll be here when you need us," and so I went, and looked, and poked in boxes and around shelves, and ran up and down escalators and laughed out loud at the leopard-print toilet seat covers in the women's restroom and there, at the end, there were the wide, safe. open, sunny front doors, and there I went into the streets, with the traffic and the boys in the suits and the construction workers in the orange uniforms and the painted girls and the fog rising up and the horns and the rail cars....

Across the street, a group of women stood, holding hands over an opening in the ground. Steam rose up from its innards and one by one they bent down to look, inhaling the fog and straightening up, emerging with faces laden with... fangs, and gashes and oh, tears falling down their beautiful blouses, and wasted eyeballs hanging from pinpricks on earlobes and I wanted to touch and understand and heal somehow, but they turned to me and smiled and told me, again, as always before, "That way there be monsters, girly!"

And I ran.

To the bubbling saucepans. Back to the hothouse home and the overgrowing vines and the wrinkled up women and smoke. No monsters there, I thought, no monsters but the ones I make all by myself.

No monsters.

. . .

Every night, I put Maxine to bed, and every night I close the closet doors. "Why do you do that?" she asks me once in a while, and I shrug. "Because it looks neater. Closet doors should be closed unless you need something," says the cheery, perfectly rational Mom. Of course.

So far, so good, I'm thinking. She seems to have accepted my explanation at face value. So far.

. . .

Then I run into Eva again which is really just... appropriate, in the end. Who among us has any energy left to tell her to go away?

"You should just publish her diary and get it over with," says the Boy, and I say yes, well, that would be good, I could do that, I could just go and open a Blogger account and no-one would be the wiser. I could do that.

But, fuck, then what? Do I bring her back? Do I tell you what she's like, I mean really like, with the callousness and the broken promises and those looks, oh those looks that she gives, and do I tell you that despite everything, every time you see her you end up giving up, and sitting down, here, plop right down Maggy, be nice... "Eva, how can I help you? What can I do?"

"The story isn't in her diaries," I tell the Boy and he looks at me, perplexed.

"Are you sure?" he asks.

It isn't the wine that answers. "No, I say, I'm not sure. But still I don't think... no the story is not Eva, it's Eva's wake. Look! Look around you, it's the crazies who chase after her, and the trouble she gets into, and the people she owes money, and the lost bets, and the bad deals, and the abandoned children..."

He nods. "All right. You seem to know what you're doing. Write whatever you need to write." I don't know what I'm doing.
. . . "So how do you distinguish an unusually realistic dream from what you normally call reality?"