Minneapolis, MN

This feels like a strange dream. I’m waiting for my eyes to open, to turn to the first acquaintance I run into and diagnose what they think it all means. I pinch myself and watch the skin on my arm change from white to red. This is no dream.

I’m sitting in a room at a seemingly endless conference table. The chairs perfectly lined one against the other. Florescent lighting. Red accented items are strategically placed in a stark white room. Two people enter and sit across from me. They are familiar yet distant. I’m unsure of their middle names or favorite foods but their mannerisms are comfortingly familiar, the small winks, the excessive blinking and eye rolls, the hearty forced laughter. Their murmurs rise and fall. Somehow my hands interpret their vocal vibrations into some form of outline. Suddenly, my whole Sunday is planned on paper before me.

Silence falls in the room. They are staring my way, eyes wide with anticipation. A folded piece of white paper is pushed across the table towards me as they share quick glances of approval. I unfold it slowly. It reminds me instantly of the mock-blue prints my sister and I used to draw up while planning out the older versions of ourselves from a fuchsia walled bedroom. Magazines scattered across the thick browning carpet, we’d turn through pages of headless adults, used in previous life dreams, in search of the most photogenic child to claim as our own.

This floor plan is lacking the color and blinding hope of adolescence. I don’t see any glue sticks handy. I look up from the table and they are both gone. The lights snap off from lack of motion. I stand and walk out to a van covered in blue flowers. Tom Petty blares from the radio.