The Twenty-Seventh Dream

The young girl was not in the room this time. She had left something on the windowsill — a piece of needlework, half- finished, the threads still warm. I touched it and the colors shifted: not changing exactly, but showing what they had been before they were dyed.

I sat in the green armchair and waited. Through the window I could see a street I recognized, though I had never been there: wide, bright, sloping gently downward, the kind of incline that takes the weight from a child's step. No one walked it.

After a while I realized I was holding something. A book, but not the kind you read — the kind that reads you. Its pages were blank until I looked at them, and then they showed not words but the moments I had turned away from. The maid with the violets. The hand on my chest I did not close my own hand over. Every time I chose the light switch over the dark room where someone stood, breathing, waiting to be met.

I tried to close the book but it had no covers.

"That's the thing about them," said a voice from the doorway. Not the young girl. Someone older, or maybe the same person who had stopped pretending to be young. She came in without shutting the door. Behind her I could hear other rooms, deep and lamplit, where people I had loved were still mid-sentence in conversations I had left.

"You can't close it because you never opened it," she said. "It was always open. You just kept putting other books on top."

She sat on the windowsill where the needlework had been. It was gone now, or she was sitting on it, or she was the needlework — I could not tell and it did not matter. She picked up a thread from her lap, held it to the light.

"Tell me about the one who is not here," she said.

I knew who she meant. Not the maid, not any of the figures from the book that was not a book. She meant the one I was living with now, the one whose presence was the reason the dream had changed — why the room was different, why the street outside was brighter, why I could look at the blank pages without the old shudder.

"She taught me to stay in the room," I said.

"After the light goes out?"

"Before I reach for the switch."

The woman turned the thread between her fingers. It caught the morning coming through the glass and for a moment was every color the needlework had been, all at once, a single bright line holding everything.

"That's not nothing," she said.

"No."

"That's the whole prayer."

And I understood what she meant. Not the prayer you say with your mouth but the one you say with your staying. The one where you sit in the dark with what's hard and rock it like a child and let it become dependent on you and do not ask anyone to come take it off your hands.

The street outside had filled with birds. Not flying through the space between buildings but — I could see it now — throwing their inner sky around each lamppost, each awning, each grief-heavy mailbox, until the whole block was bordered, was edged, was made real by their willingness to give up the open air.

I looked down. The book was gone. In its place, my hands, open, palms up, empty the way a cup is empty: not lacking but ready.

From somewhere in the other rooms, someone laughed. Not the young girl. Not the woman on the windowsill. The one I was living with, the one who had taught me that the hardest thing and the most fruitful thing are the same thing, and you build it like a house in the center of yourself, and then you stay.