LOVE'S A TWO-WAY DREAM

I had a student job at the school cafeteria then they announced a new rule that women would HAVE to wear a bra to work from here on out so I responded w “fuck chick fil a”. i knew that rule meant that the cafeteria had become a distributor for chicfila and I got written up and had to go to chickfila headquarters.

They are gathered in a familiar house. Three people sit close together on a couch, she sits on one side, another person on the other, and the one who knows both rests between them. She steps away briefly to retrieve a plate from the kitchen, a small act of care. When she returns, the air has shifted. The two on the couch are holding hands, fingers threaded together with an ease that suggests this is not new. The room seems to notice before she does. Molly widens her eyes in surprise before they return to their former state. She borrows that reaction. She tells herself to move slowly, to be generous. They arrived together, after all. She does not want to fracture the room or make the revelation recoil. So instead of anger, she asks a question, steady but thin: how long? The answer stretches backward in time, farther than she expected. They smile at each other while she studies their interlocked hands, as if the truth is written in the spaces between their fingers. In that instant, she feels strangely naked like her feelings have been placed on a stage in front of all their mutual friends. She reminds herself to be open, to be understanding. She asks the third figure why nothing was revealed to her before this moment. The explanation is calm: something had been growing quietly, at a distance, waiting to take shape in person. It was never meant to be hidden. The scene shifts. The one who knows them both, in the middle, disappears and becomes more like a presence who is not in sight. Now it is just her and the other person sitting on the couch. She notices how easily affection flows toward him, how naturally it gathers there. She thinks of all the moments she waited for that same current to turn toward her. Still, she asks questions. If affection has chosen him, then there must be something extraordinary about him. A quiet realization settles in: perhaps she mistook proximity for promise. Perhaps she built meaning from gestures never meant to hold it. The disappointment that follows is not sharp but hollow. It is not directed at anyone in the room. In the final stretch of the dream, she senses her own endurance like a thread pulled too tight. She wonders how long it can hold before it snaps, and what the sound of that rupture would be like.

It's cold and I am outside of a mall. I feel like I might be waiting for someone, but I decide to enter through a door near the corner of the building. I think it's around christmas time and it feels like it's 2009. The first floor I discover is jcpenney and the lights are turned off. I see an escalator in the middle of the room that's illuminated by a tiny square at the top of the stairs. I ignore the eeriness and I hurry up the escalator. I'm searching for melatonin or something adjacent because for some reason I know I must sleep, but this store is very limited in that department. I wander off and I get lost between clothes racks. I see these hip hugger jeans that remind me of my favorite pair so I stop and browse. While I'm distracted I notice an influx of people coming from all sorts of directions that I wasn't aware of before, this seems almost too patterned that I can't help but grow paranoid that these people must be orchestrating something against me. They have 70s haircuts and are wearing bootcut jeans. There are too many of them to actually all be after me is what I'm thinking so I pretend not to notice them as I try and squeeze my way through. I can tell they're staring at me, some with dirty looks, but i dont stare back in case that can be misinterpreted as a provocation. So I go back downstairs to the void where I meet a woman security guard and I can finally take a breath. She asks me if im finding everything all right i was afraid of being honest so i said i’d just step outside for a minute — * I also found myself forgetting how to spell capuchin monkey or maybe i was spelling it right but just did it so many times that it started to look/feel wrong * .

I’m working underground fixing some plumbing for a parking structure. Some coworkers and I started playing handball with a tennis ball we found. The ball rolled off towards the edge of the parking structure and while a guy and I were both walking over to it we started talking about how maybe our reality wasn't real. We kept thinking of ways we could prove it and made absurd attempts to help this. Then we reached the tennis ball and started playing again and everyone joined in shortly after. Another co-worker comes running from a corner and tells us a pipe had burst while we were slacking and now the garage was flooding. I climbed the ladder quickly to reach the surface and once I did I became Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal was my uncle. Apparently we owned a gas station and a guy came in and sold something to my uncle (pedro pascal) which made him/us like 100x richer.

My coffee was made with backyard dirt that was apparently supposed to be the new health craze of LA. it was a boujee cafe so i was like F it o kay. I started drinking my coffee and noticed something squirming around so I pulled it out and it turned out to be a tape worm. Whatever. Some lady who was also named Helen came up to me and said her birthday was on June 7th of 1963 and I replied with “omg i’m 03”.

I was listening to Fiona Apple in my school’s courtyard, drifting in and out of hallucinations. Everything felt slightly unstable, like I wasn’t fully inside my body. I walked up the steps toward the library, but when I reached the top, the building had transformed into something that looked more like the White House. Inside, Donald “Chump” was there. I panicked and tried to put my shoes on so I could leave quickly, but instead I kept putting hats on my feet. A well-dressed privileged-looking family nearby started laughing at me. I didn’t care. I just wanted to leave. Before I could, Chump’s skinny white intern stopped me and handed me a form to fill out. It asked me to note whether he had overstepped any boundaries. But when I looked down at the paper, it wasn’t a real questionnaire at all. The page was covered in stupid memes with checkboxes next to them, and every single box had already been marked.

I was outside playing with the kids from my neighborhood when one of them told me she had tried to cook something because she was hungry but needed help. I followed her into her house and walked toward the kitchen. As soon as I got there, I saw a watermelon sitting on the stove, covered in oil and completely up in flames.

We were meeting people and this guy told us he had a secret he wanted to share with us. He told us he used to work at a farm and collect rats then slice them up and stick them inside of horse poop and eat it as a poop burrito with the rat as protein

I was living in SF, and I guess I had wiped out diving down some steep slope. at the top of the slope was my boss’s place, a tall three-story house. The basement was packed with vintage clothes people had donated. The first floor was this little discount shop she ran, kind of like a thrift store but more chaotic, and the top floor was where she lived with a balcony and everything. At some point I was back at my place showering, and I realized I forgot something important and had to run all the way to her shop to grab clothes. I was completely naked running amok. So I'm sprinting through this super sketchy area, feeling like everyone’s staring at me, terrified someone’s going to grab me or something. I got to the shop and she had this miniature hog that guarded the shop floors because she was lowkey running some underground meat operation out of the place. But the hog liked me, so it didn’t freak out when I came in. in the basement she had a badger that would literally eat anything and was weirdly loyal to her. I almost followed her into this meat locker area, but I got too scared to actually look at what was in there. —--- Something else happened but i stopped typing out my dream—----

somehow fiona apple and i just happened to live in the same neighborhood, and she invited me over. We drank tea and sat on her living room couch for hours. She spoke so calmly, like everything she said had already been thought through ten times. At one point she told me that if she were any piece inside her house, she’d be the carved crown molding that holds the stained glass together. Later we were texting, and I was telling her about something really personal. She kept replying in these cryptic little phrases, like she was turning it over in her head and building toward something. Then out of nowhere she sent me this quick, jazzy kind of song she made about my lived experience. I was outside listening to it when she walked up and asked if I liked it. I couldn't get anything out so I just started crying and hugged her.

I had a dream that it was the last day of high school. Math was my sixth period, and I finished the exam early, so they let me leave. I started wandering around, planning to grab a coffee from the cafeteria and just relax. but when i stepped outside it was pouring rain, and i was only wearing socks. so i had to run to the locker room first and steal a pair of shoes. Then I went to the café and sat at a table with a guy I knew and two other girls. We were trying to stay quiet since everyone else was still taking their finals. Out of nowhere the teacher started making weird comments, like randomly mentioning condoms and stuff, and me and one of the girls just looked at each other like ummm… this is kind of scary. so we decided to move up to the front together and try to leave. While I was near the teacher’s desk I found these earplugs with blue puffy hair sticking out of the sides, and matching nose plugs with the same blue fluff. I put them on, and suddenly Björk walked out wearing the exact same accessories. she asked if i wanted to be in her music video and i was like yes obviously. then the classroom completely transformed. It got super dark with flashing lights everywhere, and we were singing and dancing to “Who Is It.” it was so fun, I couldn't believe it was happening. At some point me and Björk started making out (oops). The girl I came up to the front with put on a full costume for the video and started making out with me too. I think she was blair from gossip girl. Then I look up and see Blake lively walk in, and apparently I'm dating her. She's like, “wow, you’ve just been kissing everyone while i was gone?” and i told her “it was for art, that’s all it was.” But even in the dream I was confused because I kind of have a bone to pick with Blake Lively, so I had no idea how I was dating her. whatever.

I had a dream that Mark Zuckerberg was staying at my place cuz we were a host family. I had a friend whose family I was staying with too and we were all talking shit about how he was so annoying and didn’t know how to laugh at things. We showed up to a reunion and my friend grabbed a raw tortilla and joked saying Mark mentioned it was his favorite cuisine.

We walk for hours. It’s nighttime, and I know we need to find somewhere safe to sleep. We get over this hill, and on the other side there’s the ocean glowing under a huge full moon. There are fireflies everywhere, and everything is washed in this soft blue light. It’s beautiful. There’s a sort of campground resort with mini cabins people can rent. I feel kind of safe there, but I’m still worried someone will kick me off the beach chairs because I’m not a member. My brother falls asleep, and I sit there watching the waves. The moon is enormous on the horizon. While I’m trying to process everything that just happened, I hear this soothing voice coming from the ocean. It makes me cry. Then everything shifts. The world turns pixelated, like Minecraft mixed with a little bit of Zelda. I walk back up the hill and see a wooden sign like in Minecraft. It says that where I was sitting is a villager base and warns that if villagers are nearby, pillagers won’t be far behind. As soon as I get over the hill, I hear grunting and angry noises. The pillagers are getting ready to attack while everyone sleeps. I rush back down the hill but trip. When I grab the grass to pull myself up, I rip out a chunk of ground and find a regular plastic fork underneath. It’s the first “real world” object I’ve seen. To test if I’m dreaming, I try digging up more things. I start pulling out $100 bills from the dirt, and that’s when I know for sure none of this is real. I run to the town hall before the pillagers can get there, but the leader is already inside, sitting calmly and drinking wine from a chalice. When he talks, his words appear in little chat bubbles. I jump on top of the table and try to knock over the glasses and fruit, but they’re glued down. So I just start smashing whatever I can and messing everything up, giving him a hard time because I know none of it actually matters.