“We become our deaths.
Our names disappear and our lovers leave town,
heartbroken, crazy,
but we are the ones who die.
We are the forgotten
burning in the streets
hands out, screaming,
‘This is not all I am.
I had something else in mind to do.’
always and only that
when there was so much more she had to do.”
Skin (p. 222)
Dorothy Allison
I dreamt I was doing all these things, trying to find my way back to old playgrounds….re-tracing old bus-routes….and the whole time I was trying to keep up with Alice via cell-phone but she was doing all these different things too and the connection was never really clear and always static or both of us busy or trying to talk at once and not understanding and finally at the end of the dream I had just slid into my seat in a class I’d taken years ago and gotten really lost trying to find and the teacher was about to start so I had to hang up and I told Alice something like “I’m sorry, I gotta go. Love you…. I’ll talk to you later.” And I hung up. And just as the teacher started writing on the blackboard the girl behind me tapped me on the shoulder and when I turned around she was all indignant like “what was that about?” I stared at her blankly and she said something like how that was the most impersonal good-bye she’d ever heard and asked who I’d been talking to, and I told her a good friend, and she said she sure couldn’t tell by listening that I thought of her that way, and implied that whoever I’d been talking to hadn’t either.
