dream inventory

for the living

Noelia Towers

(Originally posted this in December. Had no idea it truly was a prophecy. RIP my love)

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Last night you left me again and I know it’s just a dream, but my body doesn’t give a damn. My body is an old clerk with ink-stained fingers stamping

RETURNED. RETURNED.

Your family’s restaurant burned. Florida pulled you like a siren. Your kids hurt, and there’s nothing to do with that except carry it.

And the sky did that twin thing.

two suns                                           two suns

The universe got sloppy and duplicated the day. Everything doubled, everything unlivable, and you standing there blinking into it.

Another night I’m sick, the kind of sick where bones feel embarrassed to be bones. You’re driving too fast, blue truck, blue lights, and speed is mercy because it doesn’t leave room for the mind to start narrating its tragedies. It moves. It insists. Says, we’re going anyway.

We hold hands like children crossing traffic.

Not romance // survival.

The whole world is a street and we’re trying not to get flattened by it.

And then the park one.

You’re waiting for me in a park in that gray-and-black sweater, holding groceries, like domesticity is an offering you stole from somebody else’s life and brought to me in daylight.

I’m in the car with my mother and she never tells me I’m supposed to go. She never says, that’s yours. Go get it.

So I don’t,

because I’m unwashed,
because I’m unready.

We drive past you.

The worst part is you’re still standing there when the dream ends, still holding the groceries like an idiot, like someone who doesn’t know the scene is about to cut.

Once we tried to print a book. A huge one. Ours. Like we could bind this thing and make it legal, make it touchable, make it stop slipping.

But the printer ran out of ink.

And people lined up anyway, waiting for pages that wouldn’t come, waiting for proof, waiting for the part where it all makes sense. And I’m sorry but that’s so funny in a terrible way because isn’t that us?

Standing in line for what won’t print.

Then you’re getting married, and you ask if there’s anything I want to say, like you’re handing me the mic at my own funeral. You trust me with your invitations and I edit them carefully, because what else do you do at 2am except make your heartbreak grammatically correct?

Like a woman arranging flowers at her own funeral.

Pretty petals. No screaming.

We bought land separately, random plots in the woods, and of course they touched. Across the road, the whole forest burned, Sierra-sized.

We lay in the grass with palms lifted to feel the heat.

Warming our hands on catastrophe.

And I thought, yeah. Okay. I get it. This is how love works for people like us:

adjacent.
on fire.
still holding.

And then that one where I sat with you and your wife, and you kept inviting me places while she learned my laugh, my tells, my name.

I smiled like a good girl with a bad heart because what am I supposed to do, flip the table?

“These are not omens,” you say.
“These are not prophecies.”

Okay. Fine.

But dreams are just the body telling the truth when the mind is asleep, and the truth is you keep leaving and I keep watching.

And still.

Still.

My hand knows yours even in the dark.




This grew from a run of dreams I’ve been recording for three decades—the symbols stayed put and the story kept going.