Dusty Dreams

My dream tastes like train coffee and a crumbly biscuit from a kind stranger. It's gritty like the sand and god-knows-what between slipper and sole. It gathers like sweat at the nape of my neck, and black smoke that chokes until my dream turns into freedom in lawless hills between rice paddies and streams.

This dream, it smells of mud and rain and phenyl in crowded hospitals. It is slow like the days that feel like weeks, and those last few moments before sleeping in a grimy hotel room where I look for comfort in the wrong places. When I look in the right places, the dream is unstoppable, booming laughter and Tibetan prayer flags and a piece of boiled corn as yellow as the sun.

I always thought that when my dreams left the clouds to touch the earth, they would fall like welcome rain on parched skin. But my dream is scorching sun and flooded pathways and unanswered questions about the child with the swollen belly. You don't always get to wake up when it hurts.