// A Dream about Family//

I went to sleep with a crook in my eyebrows. I went to sleep with a miscommunication looming over me. I spoke too soon and with a sharpened tongue. Someone said to me “Hurt people hurt people.”

I woke up and she was in a big tulle dress. She has a round face with big pores. She’s wearing too much glittery powder on her eyelids and too much clumpy mascara on her lashes, but she could she herself clearly.  Not fogged by abuse or molested or full of mistakes or overweight, but simple and happy. Because even people with scarred and rotting hearts want to be happy on their wedding days. I watched with a convincing unhappy smile. This is the frame of my childhood house. The shaken and shouting house on Belgrave. I couldn’t be happy for an unhappy person. Everyone that can possibly understand is unhappy. Only the innocent were happy.

We came home and she said, “I can’t do it anymore. Let’s sit down with her and have a talk,” she shouted at me, “What, do you think I’m happy?” I am shaken and shouting. I’m my childhood house on Belgrave. I’m the house with a sliding glass door that scratched its metal border as it opened. The cement with the plastic igloo house and the plot of grass that would seem much smaller if I went back. The line of tall trees that served to be the consistent and quiet. She said to me without traces of regret that she didn’t want to know anymore.