A Story That Starts With Waking Up From a Dream

You wake up and have no idea

where you are. You’re in a room

you’ve never been in before.

You get up and open the door,

walk out into another room

somehow even less familiar

than the one you just left. You go

through the rest of your life like that—

room after room, day after day,

meeting new person after new person—

everything all new. You wake up

and your nose is covered in hair.

You check yourself over, head to toe,

and that’s it, only your nose.

You think about how maybe it would be better

if it were all of you. All hair. You never wake up

as a cockroach. You wake up

and you’re naked, standing in front

of a classroom. You wake up

and you’re the complete opposite

of who you were before. What exactly

that means is up to you. You never wake up

at 6 a.m., the sound of your alarm playing

“I Got You, Babe.” You wake up

to an incredible, uncanny, overwhelming,

debilitating sense of déjà vu. You wake up

and feel like you’re falling. Down

an elevator shaft, out of an airplane,

from a bridge, through a great empty expanse

of nothing, down down down… You wake up

with a glowing feeling of euphoria. It feels

like you’re floating. You take your hand

and try to slide it between your body

and your mattress, and startle

when it does so freely. You are in fact

floating. On purpose? Is this something

you can control? How long will it last?

As soon as your brain forms the question,

your body falls back to reality. You don’t wake up.

That was it. Did you expect something else?