I went to bed early last night. It was a tired time that said, “I’m done here. There’s nothing else useful left for me to do.”  I put my phone on do not disturb except for family, and stared out the window ready to watch the moons’ trajectory up and across my window. At some point this dream came:

I was sitting at a long table in a nondescript room. The table had a white cloth on it, covered with a few plates and a couple of large bowls.  I was the only woman at the table. The men were all white and all had long hair and small beards.  A man performed a simple magic trick and everyone responded in a sedated, murmuring way.   My dreaming self knows this is the table of apostles. I said something but I don’t know what, but it was akin to, “Wait. Here’s mine.”  There were two vessels on the table near me and I picked them both up. One was a tall, opaque plastic pitcher you get from the dollar store and the other was a fancy black glass pitcher, one my living self bought from that gift store all those years ago on clearance because I had to have that beautiful, understated, black glass pitcher.   I dumped the ice cubes out of the white plastic pitcher in a bowl in the center of the table with my left hand. I took the empty black glass pitcher in my right hand and put its mouth over the plastic one and waited. The room waited.  My dreaming self said, “I can do this,” and water began to drip drip drip from the empty glass pitcher into the white one. And then it was filled. I put them both down. The dream ended.

I went to bed early last night because I’d had enough.  Something loud and clanging like a ladder falling to a cement floor below woke me.  I don’t know what woke me, but when I did, my heart was pounding. Pounding. Pounding.  It was pounding not in the familiar fear of Godzilla coming, a death coming that I knew I could not escape and I would live the fear forever,  but the pounding of someone that I loved was coming, who I wanted to see and my words would be inadequate.   My heart pounded because I knew I could do this, I can do this, in the face of all scrutiny, in the fear of my falling, the adrenaline rush of “let me show you, I can do this” but everything ends in a silent room.  The dream ends.

And all I can tell you is that my heart was pounding, I was not afraid, but I wanted to know why, so I threw off my blankets and went to my kitchen to drink water, heart still pounding, not afraid, knowing what it feels like.