What dream do you remember most vividly? What message do you think it bears?
At some point in my childhood, I dreamt I was a spy. Perhaps some kind of ancient Mesopotamian or Egyptian spy? Perhaps I fell asleep to archaeology porn (the Search for Jesus's Face. somesuch)? The dream does that dream-thing, opening in medias res, with a thickness that wears like a lived history. I am aware that I am spying and that I am pretending to be or posing as or in some kind of mummy sacrophagus, keeping watch over what appears to be a meeting of evil-doers. And/or poker players…the set-up, like all bad jokes, is the same. A circular table, taupes, wood or wood grain, a clutch of hunching men…Only I stumble, I break my freeze, and immediately they descend upon me. "YOU MUST GO TO QUEEN AKADA'S TOMB!" I am to believe that this will be palliative, not so much punitive. Suddenly, from this relative realism, I am dropped into a cartoon blackness. There's a cartoon sun, only somehow harsh, grotesque, spared the garish smiling of most of his/her kind…this is, this must be Queen Akada. The blackness around the floating sun-face is snapping on surgical gloves. I become acutely aware that something is about to happen, and it will be awful. I ask, "Will it hurt?" The sun/Queen answers, "Only for a few seconds," and, just as I brace myself against that, I wake up. Fear of doctors? Which is to say, fear of pain?
Why don’t you listen to what the universe or your mind or your body or your god whispers ever more closely to you?
I suppose I listen but am leery of acting. Leery, lazy. But when the message is so fickle…
If you could, what gift that is impossible for you to give would you offer and to whom? Why this specific gift to this specific person or persons?
I would like my pets to live exactly as long as I do and to simply fall asleep and not wake up as I die. Painlessly, ignorantly. I know that, on some level, this is what euthanasia is. But I hate outliving these furry little subjectivities, these trusting little monsters, and being the one to survive losing them.
Describe a person you love. How would you know them without their face?
Now, is this some scenario wherein I am blind? Or does my lover have no face, as in, was in some face-shearing accident? Is his face now a smooth surface, like a fingertip? Or a fog, as in unransomed television? Or are you claiming his entire physicality? The ticklish bleat of his laugh? His radiant temperature? His lanky pranksterisms?
How did you first know you were in love and what makes you unsure of it?
He felt like a place I could pad around in in bare feet. Although sometimes I feel most honest when I'm utterly alone.