There was a house sketched on the back of a restaurant napkin, a Frank Lloyd Wright approximation. One wall was comprised of all glass windows that yielded to the sun. I found this drawing abandoned on the table in the chain restaurant I worked at while trying to pay my way through college. I put it in the pocket of my apron on impulse.

Back at the dorm I smoothed out the wrinkles, and ignoring the grease stains, I pined it to the bulletin board above my desk. In tiny block letters neat and contained, written above the front door that gaped like an open mouth it said, Our Dream Home. I tried for days to remember the stranger who could have sat and sketched something so tender. His or her face was lost among the late day rush of steaks cooked medium rare and microwaved bowls of clam chowder. Someone had thought to architect their dreams but then abandoned them aside the dirty flatware and glasses of Coca-Cola.  This filled me with sadness. I kept that napkin for weeks, until my roommate complained that our dorm smelled like pickles. I ended up throwing the napkin away.

We cannot possess other people’s dreams. We can only bear witness.

Last night I dreamed that I was falling.  I hurtled through space, a body mass drawn by the earth’s gravitation pull. Time, which felt like days, was only actual minutes. I existed in a constant state of agitated trajectory. I woke with a feeling of weightlessness that has stayed with me throughout the day. How does a planet’s mass determine its life story?

I try and moor myself in questions. My mind wanders. I daydream about my seventh grade crush. He raised his hand in science class to admit he worried about falling stars. In that moment, I would have given anything to be one. I wonder about the type of man he has grown into. Does he still have fear when he stares into the night sky?

I worry that I am going to disappear against the history of other people’s stories. What will set me apart? I cannot draw pictures. I just barely passed my science classes, but I have not lost the impetus to dream.

If I discarded myself in a fit of insecurity, a crumpled napkin against the detritus of used plates and the crusts of half eaten bread, would you smooth me out and pin me to your bulletin board? Would you promise to fall in love with me against the worrying of my stars? I feel so silly asking you to bear witness. But here I am.

This is my house of glass and light. See how I yield against the sun. Turn your face and warm with me. The night is heavy with stars. Let’s count them one by one. Forget gravity. Fall blind on your back with nothing but the flat of the earth to catch you.  Read my story, and be dizzy with your own dreams.

I have always been prone to aimless wandering, lazy-centric circles in spiral notebooks that should have held the sum of mathematical equations all lined up in ram-rod straight rows. I could never get my mind around the rigidity of numbers, pretending instead that the shape of all those open-curved twos in my algebra textbooks were leaping frogs. Eight times all those hump-backed amphibians let loose across the landscape of my page, squared, only amounted to a failing grade on my report card. What good does this imagining do me when in the real world I still can’t figure out how much less the shirt in my hand is going to cost me minus 25 percent?

I have no head for numbers. I tell this to the man who marries me. This is my way of begging his forgiveness for the impracticality of my degree in literature, the one that we will have to spend the next 10 years paying off in small increments.  What do I have to show for my knowledge of the functions of an arc, except for a proclivity towards sun-splayed floral comforters on king size beds and long days spent making love to literature?

Poetry?

There was a moment lost somewhere before this, a moment I am trying to recapture.  

I am going to be a writer

I tell this to my college advisor. I emphasize each word, as if just saying them aloud could suddenly transport me to my Manhattan rent-controlled apartment, a cramped loft I would share with four other women. We would sit around all hairy-legged, angst, drinking cheap wine out of a box, empty plastic glasses with sugar-encrusted rims toppling against the makeshift egg crate table. I would lean my spiral notebook against the wobbling frame as I penned the great American novel with a pencil that had no eraser. I would gladly put my trust in the number 2 if and when. All it would have taken was a second person to believe in me at that moment.

Do you know how many people actually make a living off of their writing? Do you know how talented you would actually have to be?

Actually?

 The nineteen year-old girl with the sweaty-palmed poem in her back pocket, tight-fisted her writing, and went into hiding. I used that number 2 pencil to bubble in the answers on the state certification exam. I became a teacher in the suburbs instead.

Regret?

It all depends on what you do with it. And so, I write it down.

This blogging becomes the practical, the bastion to protect the dream.  

I share with you the choices we make each day: one pigtail or two in my daughter’s reckless hair. Should I have that extra slice of pizza? How many times can I hit snooze? Where will we place our naked bodies when we come together this way we pray in side by side skin? Which hand is mine to hold? There is frugality and excess both in these dream as yet unraveling.

Nothing is inconsequential.

Anything worth believing will not be spared in verse.