return

Last night, I dreamed a sort of holy trinity — my mother, my sister, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Rosmarie was playing the piano, a new composition, an obscure German play set to music. She was on the stage of a school gymnasium that I didn't recognize.

My mother and sister were urging me to walk with them, a meandering walk through the woods, but I wasn't wearing the right shoes. "You can't." They both shook their heads until I found sneakers.

Everyone in the dream is a part of you, my therapist told me once. I was describing a dream in which I was frightened. I was at a bar, alone and there was a group of men at the far end. This was something that had also happened in my waking life.

As a dream, those men were a part of me? What part of me might they be.

A gathering of friends to honor someone we lost. We met by the sea. We scattered rose petals on the sand. The sky was gray. It felt like rain, but it didn't. We stood in a circle and told our stories. It was hard to hear sometimes, the wind, the ocean. It's all so fleeting.

I have lived long enough to say that I was here at the start of things. Things that now — this year — are marking twenty years. Twenty years! A school my children attended, an organization I led for a time. A marriage. Twenty years. Unimaginable.

What endures, what is lost.

What is lost for a time, then returns.