shiver

A night that lasted years, full of rolling, roiling confused dreams. The first half of the night has me half-awake, shivering cold, moving between states of consciousness in which I am aware of being cold, of getting cramps in the muscles behind my knees as I keep my legs clamped together against my body, while my dreams move through visits to those cities in the South East (the south east of which part of the world, though) in which I only find recently vacated ruins, derelict towns with torn posters on the walls, bits of paper whirling in little swirls in street corners, while I still shiver. Then I go into a building and find a classroom, a tall female teacher is dictating something I don't understand -ah, it's Miss Olivieri, it's been so long. She looks younger than I am now, though, which is odd -she'd be eighty now if not more. Ok, I have to wake up, it is too cold. There are several layers of dreams left unsolved but I must do something about this. I take a long swig of cold water from the little fridge and dig out, in the dark, some winter long-johns from a drawer. Ah, that's better. The rest of the night takes forever, too, waiting for the alarm bell to come up at 5:20 am (it must be near that, surely, it's been so long) but much much better; I am aware of not being cold any longer as I move across fields of dreams, from that flat that belongs to my uncle that is so much like a museum and so much like a labyrinth, up there on that tenth floor in the building with the strange side-ways lift, to the old house in Catia which keeps sprouting new rooms and people -and also new cracks and leaks. Finally, the alarm bell goes off -a quite soothing new-agey sound from the smart phone. I make it snooze and lie there in the dark, breathing in this being here, this being alive, right now.