And we kept talking about things we didn't mention the night before

Wednesday morning I dreamt I went downtown to see the art my friends made as children, but when I arrived I only wanted to take cellphone photographs. I climbed to an apartment building where an old woman cleaned the glass walls until they had better color saturation than you've ever seen. My cellphone camera was telescopic and wide-angled too, and my pictures had depth of field like an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

It was winter-raining, and freezing cold too, but I held my coat over my shoulder and didn't have to step around the crowd. In dreams I'm scared of going down stairs like I am of ladders when I'm awake, worried my legs won't take to that precarious slant, and I just made it down the outdoor stairwell to the ground. The commuter trains ran right through the streets, or the streets turned to trains, and I was constantly jumping for my life. Every color of route ran parallel, but ended up in places that really sounded like sacred-sky blue or summer-romance orange.

I realized I'd forgotten to write down the address of the gallery I came to see, and I thought about going straight home, but I decided to wander and photograph instead. The trains kept coming, and I wound up inside their station, and the voice on the PA read out a search for spare trains that sounded like a missed connections advertisement. There were great marble halls that looked the same but reached different halves, and along them were the rooms of the gallery. They were rectangular and white, sunken into the floor, with a display table for every child like the fourth-grade science fair.

I saw my own work in the middle of the left side, and it was yellow and purple and pink, bright but in a good way because I can love every color. There was a sweatshirt hanging, made of stripes of ribbon, and probably collage and objects too, all of it much better than the empty time capsule I actually left myself from elementary school. I wanted to go stand quietly before it, contemplating others' contemplation, but I sat down on the steps between two boys and a girl, cool-looking kids, and got to talking instead. They were taking the train home, and before I knew it our steps were train seats and we were on the 1:25 express and it was a little too late to jump.

When the train came in, my new friends were gone and Daniel was waiting to walk me home because I wasn't hardly old enough to make it alone. When I woke up I wasn't sure where trains went at all, but I was wrapped in the ghost of Alison, and I felt like I could do anything if I could just get to the station, because if I could make it there I might as well call it home.

Tell me a fairy story

You're following the lines, but they run together sooner than you'd like to admit and no amount of combing will keep rational and emotional apart. You're watching films that make you want to hold out for the right one, but everyone you meet is just a little fraction of what people can be and when you pile it up the deck is still stacked so thin it hurts.

Come on down, pea princess, and tell us how you fell beneath everyone's expectations. Art! Darling, you have barely enough to get dressed and there's just never anywhere to go. Once upon a time, quiet punky Michelle would tell you how awful it was to see you sad, but empathy in the face of perception of emotion is nearly always too much for you to take.

So Stoked & All Caps Come Easy

[Make word-for-word post of the following, except section beneath dash mark. I already well-edited, girl. Actually, consider including section below dash as well.]

First gasp of synesthesia: you are feeling the sound crawling into your ear canals like a little tentacle off an anemone's friend, like an icicle, (like a Centaurian slug), like the only time this has ever happened before. Is it the beating of your heart reflected into the mind? I want to believe, I want to believe it is the vibrations of the hairs reverberating like guitar strings through your smooth-curved body parts, ringing-fading until you reach gently to silence them against your skin.

Boy, never quite friends, learn to play not because you will display the technical skill of the greater masters; play because your heart is nearly in between it. Play because we are marshmallowed into the same sheets, and my ears clutched with the dulling— but your fingers warmed closer to the fire. You gotta make it catch, let it heat up, keep it crunchy, and smash it sweetly to the boards.

Sweet, do you believe this? This is a metaphor about music, sex, and guitar pickin' roastin' s'mores. I should have resolved to tell you like it is (but deliciously subtle, may have to make do): what I am really here to do for you is fidget my cells in the accidental production of periwinkle light. Light like that is the true light of the universal beings, and all of us but little algorithms employed in its provision.

You are discovering what you are truly good at, girl: you write. you are sound-feeling because you are (bang!) sound to the ground with all the force of gravity behind you. Take this so new-found undiscovered and quick, erase the truth!

—
"Can't Stand It" with Andrew Bird is fantastic. Jesus Christ, thank you Jeff Tweedy for making this be. The city blinks because its eyes open and shut of insomnia! You texted MC P: "Forget anything I might have said about it: you are completely right about how good 'Impossible Germany' is." Put it to the test, though you have no options in the discovery: maybe the loosening of the melodies is what it takes to harmonize at last.

He says that no other song is as good, then, but you say, "This is not true. I will show you." and you'd like to make it "with all my heart", all your heart in these sounds spread so wild like the brown-rice paddies of the post-apocalyptic Midwest, the great arched-roof palaces of Chicago and Saint-Louis and Chicago and Saint-Louis and Chicago rising to rule the land as once did the calls for price and demand. (And that is the last warm-blooded description of Wilco you will ever hear from me.)

How does ringing of "Impossible Germany" compare to characteristic ringing of U2? Ask Mikey, compare, think about it.

Frozen-marshmellow-topping lollypops? Oh my goodness, try it.

Partial fragments of warm-afternoon words in the notepad of your phone. Post them.