I’m fully through the looking glass now, not in Kansas anymore, whatever you want to call it. There’s a whole wide world out there, changeable and unpredictable, vast and beautiful, and it’s all mine. I can even travel back to that strange little void space, which now has a door I can always open, if I get overwhelmed. That’s the inside of my own head, I think, a blank canvas for me to build on. But without the materials of someone else’s dreams, the canvas stays blank, like trying to cook a dish without ingredients. I want to eventually figure out how to dive deep into my own head, like Dr. Bright has said some people do, but she ghosted me this week for a “family emergency” so I’m on my own.

I never knew it could be like this. That sleeping could be so much better than waking life. Emily has been doing a Shakespeare unit in one of her classes this semester and has been analyzing the “to be or not to be” speech and, I’ll be honest, I didn’t get most of what she was talking about except “to sleep, perchance to dream.” Hamlet wanted to sink into dreams, except the long sleep he was contemplating doesn’t come with a guarantee of dreaming. We don’t dream when we’re dead. But there is no “perchance” when it comes to me, because when I sleep, I know I’ll dream. I know I’ll dream and it will be better than being awake and turning over life’s big questions in monologue. Maybe if Hamlet could dreamdive, he wouldn’t have worried so much.

NOVEMBER 24TH, 2016

I have always operated under the belief that good food makes everything better—it comforts people, brings them together, gives me a purpose, a role in my family—and I’m happy to say that, while that belief was battered and bruised today, it came out on the other side of Thanksgiving still intact.