4 for a sleepless night/morning

1.

At night I dream of returning home from somewhere foreign. I’m not sure where I am: Seattle or Portland, the whole thing’s fuzzy. In this dream I am running from someone. I am all big conversations and repressed feelings. I am shouting and screaming and watching as this group of strangers gawks at my self-imposed suffering. And so, I leave to return home.

The journey should not be so hard but there is the sudden added wrinkle of my pug mysteriously joining me. With him in tow, I cannot take a plane and so I debate endlessly to myself which would make him less anxious: train or car, knowing I have no trazodone on me to knock him out.

I decide to take a car, which transforms the whole dream into a vague cross-country road trip motif. Why? Who knows how dreams work?

2.

With my problems solved, my dream transforms again and suddenly I am a rich author (a novelist) in the space age. I haggle with a spaceship seller, attempting to get a good deal (free) on a spaceship, not just a flying car. The model he shows is sleek and chrome, it is small but I don’t need much.

“You might have heard of me,” I tell him. “I am a novelist and in the middle of my next great story.” He has heard of me, like all of them have. My novel, in this world was a big hit, a breakthrough success though I am not certain what it was even about. “I am leaving Earth,” I tell him. “And visiting all 133 planets to write a love story for each one. It could be a good branding opportunity for you: to have your ship associated with the defining novel of our age.”

When I wake up I am fascinated by this other me and his novel of planetary love. Like Italo Calvino with his Invisible Cities, he is attempting to give a form and function to metaphor, to craft metaphor from physicality. I wonder what a short love story about a planet would even be. I imagine it would not be so linear or logical. How else could you describe a planet while also describing love?

I imagine a planet rich with organic life: tall trees and vines; buildings made of great white stone that sparkle in the night time. This planet’s citizens fall easily in love. To them it is a social contract made with whoever is willing. They give freely to this idea of love. They love many people throughout their lives, falling deeply in and out of love. When they fall apart they do not fully separate. Instead, they live together in those white stone buildings—town homes or apartments, you take your pick. They celebrate holidays together. They go to the movies. They talk proudly to each other about their new loves and new ways of being.

“Look,” they say. “Look how much I have grown.”

3.

In therapy my therapist recommends Invisible Cities to me (this is why I imagine it has shown up in my dreams) and I take it as a revelation or some mystic hidden connection, guiding me to the path I’m supposed to take.

“Yes, I’ve read it.” I tell him. “Italo Calvino was the author that made me want to be a writer.”

Maybe this is true or maybe it is not. It feels true, and I had to hold my breath and steady my hands to type out that sentence, so somehow it is significant. He was recommended to me by my English teacher, who I asked to sponsor a packet of my writing that I wanted to send in to the Scholastic writing competition. “I think you would like this author,” he told me and gave me Numbers in the Dark which I read feverishly, obsessed with Calvino’s unique style which seemed to weave the ordinary into the fantastic.

As Merve Emre wrote in the New Yorker some years ago, “When you finished, you were surprised to find that the story, burning with passion and conquest, had left you with a sensation of grief.”

And now I wonder why it has never occurred to me, until this moment, how much I seek to emulate that in each of my own stories.

“Why couldn’t life be like that?” Emre cheekily writes, but (and maybe this is because you couldn’t sleep) I have sincerely wondered that my entire life.

4.

Writing, or the desire to write, has been the most consistent thing in your life. You discovered this in therapy, though perhaps discovery isn’t the right word.

You have written since you were young. Some good stuff, some bad. You have written through every stage of your life, weaving complex feelings into succinct sentences or stories about overwhelming grief and dying worlds.

You have written:

• short stories about lovers at the end of the world.

• short stories about lovers searching for a magic cure to an incurable disease.

• fragments of stories about lovers in all kinds of ordinary situations that you hope one day you could craft into real short stories all woven around a single theme.

• a personal narrative about time and objects and your grandmother’s death.

• hundreds of thousands of copy about proposal automation software or professional development events or (worst of all) why people should eat at restaurants.

You try not to appear to desperate, but you are desperate. For someone to publish, sure. But mostly to validate that what you’re writing isn’t all bad, that some of it, like you, is good.