dreams and radio static.

a reverie.

Feb 17, 2024

“Real isn't how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

”Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes, said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.”

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, he asked, or bit by bit?”

”It doesn't happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”

― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

hazy postpartum sunset/the inside of our brains in July 2022. By Joe.

You sit up in the dark, confused by how well-rested you feel. You’re dreaming again. Tidal waves, headless monkeys, urgent and impossible problems in the restaurant where you haven’t worked in years; your sister, helpless and young, only you can save her. The dreams are wild, they leave your rabbit-heart thumping, but they come as a comfort. You haven’t dreamt since your pregnancy. Someone who seemed like they knew what they were talking about once told you that having vivid dreams is a sign that you are sleeping very deeply. You had forgotten what that sort of rest was like, and it’s nice, sleeping and dreaming, it reminds you of another time, another place, but you realize you don’t really need it anymore.

Soft gray icing forms around the edges of the window. You pick up your phone— you bought a clock radio from Goodwill so that you wouldn’t have to use your phone as an alarm anymore, so that you can reclaim the bedroom as sacred space, so that you can reclaim your brain as sacred space, but you plugged the clock radio into an outlet in the living room to test it out, and now everyone loves listening to the radio in the living room. You pick up your phone— it’s 5:53am. Tickled by potentials: quiet coffee, slow movement, concentrated morning pages, you slip out from under the covers like the dawn slips around the curtains, only to slide back under, because you glanced over at her and saw how in this particular light, in that particular position, she is five months old again, and god, she is ethereal, and you watch her breathe and you are grateful that she is breathing, remember when she first got here, how you recorded her erratic breathing rhythms and sent them to your midwife to make sure it was okay, and it was okay, and you remember that tomorrow she will vanish into something indecipherably different, so you curl your body around her body to try to stop time. You drape one arm over and scoop your hand under, like folding sourdough, and pull her close the way you used to, before she could roll and crawl, and then walk and jump and run and dance and twirl.

You rest your scarred cheek on her skull, sturdy with fontanels all closed up. You rest your scarred cheek on her skull, which has already sustained several blows from learning to walk in this world. You rest your scarred cheek on her skull, and her feathery hair tickles your nose. You breathe in her baby smell and let it carry you away, you begin to cry, your shoulders silently heaving— don’t wake her— silently heaving with the things that have been caught at the bottom of your throat for weeks, plus some new ones, and you let those things unstick themselves, and you’re relieved because you haven’t really been able to cry for awhile. You stroke her velveteen cheeks, little rabbit. You rest one finger on her soft palm, and you stoke her knuckles when they curl around yours. You think about something your friend said the other day, about mothers using their children to co-regulate, how they shouldn’t do that. You think about reincarnation, the maternal kind, this shapeshifting child, her fragile breath on your clavicle. You think about the line in the poem1 : by morning, I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better, and who wouldn’t want that, to vanish into something better, to Become? You peel yourself away, you make the coffee and do the morning pages and move your body, and when Joe wakes up, you turn the classical station on low.

You used to hate classical. They played it when you modeled for figure drawing classes at the arts center and it made you want to crawl out of your skin, something about having to stay stone still to the sound of high-pitched violin, operatic singing, painfully boring flute music, posing under that hot lamp, you couldn’t stand it. You love it now. It loosens the folds of your brain. You wanted to listen to 87.9 FM when you brought the clock radio home, but your house is in a hollow and you don’t have good service, and you should have just bought the one that had an antennae, they were both five dollars. The only station that comes in is the classical station, which you listen to constantly, it plays in the background while you chop the onions and the sticky garlic, while you sort through the clean pile of laundry on the recliner, while you do the ocean puzzle with her— whale, shark, dolphin, the starfish is MIA, you love how she says octopus— it welcomes you home when the door opens, it’s so soothing, and anyways you’re tired of always searching for the perfect podcast, the perfect song, the perfect thing to accompany every damn moment, and the radio hosts don’t try to sell you anything, they just seem like they care about the music. The gentle imperfection of static grounds you, and you like thinking about the orchestra practicing and practicing, the individual members and how maybe their parents made them stick with the oboe, even when they really wanted to quit, and they’re glad about that now that they’re older. You think it’s cool that there are people out there who play the oboe, that there are people out there who made the oboe their whole entire life.

The snow was pretty yesterday, Joe says, smiling over at you. You look over at him and realize you are frowning. He is quitting smoking again, and you’ve been driving him to work so he will not feel tempted to stop at a gas station on his way home. Quitting smoking is very hard, harder than quitting heroin or alcohol, according to the heroin addicts and the alcoholics who’ve quit both cigarettes and heroin, or cigarettes and alcohol. You look out at the Audis and the Beamers and the Teslas, the three lanes of traffic, the beige strip mall storefronts with names so cute they feel patronizing. You look over at him— at Joe, the carpenter; Joe, who knows the Latin names of every plant; Joe, who carves bumblebees and frogs and bulldogs out of avocado pits and spoons and chopsticks out of green tree branches; Joe, the mushroom forager. Joe, in his collared shirt, going to his office job, and you, in the coat you got from that overpriced, hip boutique in town for 80% off, wearing it over jeans you’ve had for over a decade and a shirt with holes in the armpits that you used to bartend in. You, with hair unwashed. You, driving a shiny car, too, with your daughter— your daughter— in the backseat, wondering what you’ll do after this, before coming back. It’s an awkward amount of time, and it’s pretty cold. We need olive oil, I could do that, you think to yourself, because the spinach needs to be eaten. You got the big thing of spinach even though it usually goes bad before you get to all of it, unless you have the perfect amount of coconut water to use it for smoothies, which is mostly why you buy spinach. You should just get the small package, but you didn’t, and you ran out of coconut water, and anyways, you have those beets, and the goat cheese, so you might as well make a salad, which you did think of in the store, but for some reason you got an extra bottle of balsamic instead of olive oil, so now you have two bottles of balsamic, and you can’t make dressing for the salad without olive oil. You also need a screen protector for the new-old phone that you are working to consciously use less, that’s why you got the watch and the planner and the notebooks and the clock radio that plays classical music in the living room. You could get both the olive oil and the screen protector at Target, but something about going to Target, again, two days in a row, in this coat, in this car, to kill time before picking up your husband from his office job, twists your face into a frown. You look in the rearview mirror and see that you’re getting wrinkles— nothing crazy, just a couple of friendly hairline wrinkles between your eyebrows, kind of a pretty shape, like crescent moons. It makes sense. Your brow has been furrowed since you were a kid with an ear pressed against the bedroom door. Joe’s getting wrinkles too, but his are crinkly and wing out around his eyes, and they are smiley-sweet. Anyways, it’s not about olive oil, or motherhood, or childlessness, or being married or being single— you’d need olive oil no matter which combination of those things you were— it’s something more about Becoming. It’s something about what your dad said once, about how life is a highway and you have to decide which exits to get off, which felt deep and important when he said it, but now it just feels cliché, so you wrestle with the phrase, try to remember exactly how he worded it because it helped at the time and you’re sure it didn’t sound like a Rascall Flats song when he said it. You think about calling him and asking but he won’t remember. You pull into the parking lot and look into the rearview mirror again, to check out those wrinkles, and as you start to remind yourself that you always said you wouldn’t be vain about stuff like this, about wrinkles, and time, you realize your daughter is asleep in her car seat, and your body blooms into a field of honeysuckle, softens with the delicious realization that you’re nap-trapped, that you are not going to the store at all, and you drive home while Candy’s Room by Bruce Springsteen plays on the radio.

dreams and radio static.

a reverie.

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