alone in a house that's under construction, but there are so many different houses, a long miniseries of moments before it is a different house and different circumstances. Sometimes I've been running from someone, but I only know that because of the foreboding feeling as I build a small nest of blankets and pillows on the frame of a couch and turn on one light above that space, to protect me from the overwhelming darkness contained in the walls and rooms around me. Twice I was avoiding the windows, the eyes of people looking in. I surveyed a space that didn't look or feel like me, its trapping unrelated to things I would value, but felt my only choice was to hunker down and wait.
Sometimes there was a man trapping me in, a slender gangster who barred all my exits, surrounding me with the innards of walls, the insulation foam spilling out, the studs exposed. In one episode, I talked to him, throwing my arms around him coyly, bargaining for my safety. We both knew what I was doing, but it pleased him. every time I put my arms around him, he doused us in clean, clear water escaping from a broken pipe. As he walked away, I wrung my hair out, fat drops of water striking the floor.
In the last episode I only spoke to him through the wood of a caution taped door, and while it felt as though I could make the wall give way with little effort, I knew he would see, so paused to consider my options. As I looked around, I realized I was in my childhood home, and suddenly saw my only escape route was out the window in my mother's room. Still staring at the piece of door in front of me, I saw down the hallway to those windows, the colors of her bedroom, the blue sarong draped over one particular open window blowing in a breeze. It was the window with the gardenia bush underneath it, and the pear and apple trees that never fruited, a few paces away, and it was sunny and refreshing and free outside of it.
When I opened my eyes, the fabric hanging of the windows in my own room let just enough light in that I could distinguish the pattern of the wind as it blew snow back and forth, weaving as it fell.
A few months ago I dreamed I was on a construction site that had torn everything down, but the foundations of a house. In the dirt, I came across a vessel, a pot like those we dig up in roman ruins. Inside, sticking out of the hole in its side - was a fish, stiff from using all the muscles in its body to try to breath. I picked it up, filled with respect for this creature managing to stay alive in an environment where it couldn't even breath, and I knew there was water underneath the foundations I could put it in. The foundation resembled a roman system for radiant heating - small columns at regular intervals sustained the weight of the building, but allowed heated or cooled water to be poured underneath, to suffuse the floors with the temp of the water. As I let the fish slide from my hand, I suddenly understood that it would move towards the source of freshest water, possibly finding a current it could follow to a more habitable place. Curious to watch it feel and respond, I lowered myself into the narrow crevasse between concrete and dirt. My pelvis got stuck for a moment, I had to tip it sideways to fit. Underneath the concrete slab, my fish was following something it could taste or feel, but it passed other fish like it, suspended in animation, mouths wide as if gasping for breath, frozen in place. Something inside of me knew that since my fish had been so long out of water, this little bit seemed rich in something that suddenly had been too little for the others.
I don't know what ever happened to that fish, but I do know it is the same one that has lived in my chest for years, the one I never notice until I am asked to commit to something, and it begins to flip around in desperation, as if it suddenly doesn't have water to move through, to breath in.
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