june 5th

I had a dream I saw you last night. We were on a train together, not speaking. Just sitting next to each other, our hands in our laps.

At the start of 2020, I had many dreams and goals and stupid ideas about things. I went back through all the pictures, watching the light in my eyes come back to rest. I find a note that I wrote myself - more friends! More YES!

You and I on the train don’t speak. In a life before this, I would have been angry, maybe. Instead I am sad to my core about things. I try to shift people more tenderly these days. I actually turn out to be shit at setting boundaries, but I’m getting better about being open. About honesty.

I probably owe you an apology. I don’t actually know if I do, or if you owe me one, or if it matters at all. There has been a lot of endings this year. I have killed about a third of what I planted. I have learned how to find the gentlest places. My new resolutions are simple and strange - to allow myself space. To take more joy in waiting. To share more moments. To hold nothing sacred except each other.

In my dream, the light shifts through the windows and the handles swing and neither of us are crying. In the real life, I keep getting messages from my students; thank-you notes because I actually treated them like people and told them to take my class less seriously than a pandemic. It feels sort of agonizing - I’m glad I could do something for them, but I don’t understand how my bare minimum was more than the respect they’re getting elsewhere.

I didn’t pick up any hobbies. I haven’t really been productive. I will be mad at myself about it, in due time - I am always historically mean to myself about terrible things. But right now I feel sort of at peace. I am just here for a ride, like you are, and the train is moving.