MORNING LIGHT, SUNLIGHT. Sunlight comes through my window. I slept so deeply and so soundly that I was certain that I had slept half the day. But when I summoned the strength to grasp my phone and read the time, it said it was still just 8.51. Our homes here are still heated by wood furnaces. There is no turning of knobs, pushing of buttons. Fortunately, last night, I discovered a whole stash of dry firewood in a chest next to the fireplace, filled with old newspapers too. This meant that I did not have to go outside. It was very damp at night. In the morning, it dropped below freezing, and turned all the moisture to frost. In the morning, I did go outside. The light and air felt good on my face. The town felt somehow reassuring. It reminds me of a maritime ferry town. Unfortunately though there is just a lake here, and there is no reassuring blast of ferry horn to announce departures and arrivals, or especially thick fog. There is something liberating about living seaside, and something arresting about being landlocked. I shouldn’t despair. In my dream, I went back to my university with my friend Raoul and his mother, who looked like the actress Sally Field. I developed some kind of crush on Sally Field in the dream, which I suppressed, because one is not supposed to be attracted to his friend’s grandmotherly mother. Nii ei tohi. We wandered the halls of the university, but everything had changed, and only the basic layout of the place remained. “It must have been nice to go here,” Sally Field said, and I agreed, except that it didn’t really look like the place I had attended, and none of the people who were once here remained. All of that had been reupholstered, as it were. There was more dreamblur. Trying to escape from a woman who kept pursuing me, and a Japanese psychologist who was waiting for me in his office, but I never managed to get there. Instead, on the way to the office, someone asked me about a classmate of mine, called Buddy (really, in real life) and I commenced to tell the tale of prom night, and how we all went out to the Hamptons and got furiously drunk, and that the last time I had seen Buddy, he was sitting beside a swimming pool the following morning, drinking some bottled water, cool and hungover. That really was the last time I saw him, or heard of him. Like many classmates, other than some postgraduate sightings, Buddy vanished. And that is the way it should be.
north! 