[...] Two nights after the dream of my grandmother, I dreamt (I was in a spate of dreaming) I was hiking with my parents in a valley. It was so dark that everything looked gray, with trees as darker shapes and rocks as light shapes. Ahead of us, suddenly, we saw a pair of glowing red eyes amid the gray. We thought it might be a bear but realized it was a mountain lion, and it had seen us. The three of us ran as fast as we could up one of the sides of the valley and found a watchtower made of stone with an apartment in it. No one was in the apartment, but it was very well stocked. The mountain lion arrived soon after, prowling at the door, which was made, for some reason, of plexiglass: the bulletproof kind in jails and twenty-four-hour bodegas. I found, in the kitchen, a cleaver, which I broke off from the handle so it was like a razor on both long edges. I cracked open the door and bounced it, like a toy, and the lion, like a dog, caught the fragment and was instantly cut. Blood was produced from the back of its mouth, so much that I worried I had killed it, but mouth wounds heal quickly. The mountain lion, which had collapsed, got up, and was a changed being. I had made it submissive. In my dreams, I think I can conquer death.

I want to demonstrate it for you more clearly. We’re sitting in the restaurant, and I have an air of sad expectation. I revert to silence, which is the most basic form of agreement, of disallowing any distance to emerge between the two of us. Oliver tells me he’s thinking about quitting a group he’s a part of. I am relieved. The group has the right intentions, but something about their process has always seemed off. I support their goals—basically good political goals—but I’ve never been able to get on board with the optimism that political work requires. I say, Bernie’s too old, and my statement is both true and disappointing. I disappoint myself by saying it. Oliver doesn’t seem to need to say that sentence to himself. But now the group’s affinity for internal drama is getting to be too much; it always knocks its knees as soon as it’s getting started with real work, preferring meetings to protests. They are a group that always says, “This is what we want to do,” and the pleasure is in announcing intention.

A couple months ago, I went to one of their meetings. Beforehand I’d asked whether, at the meeting, we would talk about a big piece of policy that had passed that week. They told me that that day’s agenda was full, the scheduled presenters had been waiting for months, and they would arrange something about the policy for a future meeting. To me, this was an unforgivable mistake; it’s more important to talk about what’s at the top of everyone’s mind than to honor the hours spent making PowerPoints. Oliver is losing faith that they will spring into action; I think the group has a lot to fight for, but it’s not personal enough for any of them.

A couple’s ambivalence can be held between two people: we both feel a little of each side, but one person is yes, and the other one no. When we first started dating, we said, We’ll date for a long time, and then we started on that long time right away. Back then, we thought maybe we would get married on our fifth anniversary. That was tonight, and neither of us brought marriage up. This is part of why I was silent, but I gave myself away by crying. When we left the restaurant, I still hadn’t clearly said why.

My friend Timothy has a genius way of teaching his students to write. He assigns them three hundred words about something or other and writes alongside them, in class. One student writes a particularly lame essay. It’s written very neatly, sentence after sentence with no cross-outs. Unrevised sentences are like molecules of ice; they form a suit of armor by being recited, one after another, holding experience in. Timothy shows the student his own copy, which has a million cross-outs and carrots and a doodly diagram in one corner. “Make it look like this,” he says, waving his hand around his own piece of paper, and the student automatically becomes a better writer. The stiff bonds holding the sentences in neat order are dissolved, and the student’s writing flows like water to fill the cave of the reader’s imagination.

I keep going back and revising this story, hoping that the tensions that hold us still in our relationship will dissolve. I walk past the restaurant a couple weeks later to see the orange color of the light again. If I can understand the things in myself that make me prefer silence to talking, I think, things will change of their own accord. This piece of writing is not meant to preserve a moment for posterity, but to take a memory of a dead moment and make the timbre of that experience speak through it, like a microphone.

MY DAD TELLS A STORY about my mom. They were swimming together in Lake Michigan, after the sun had just set, so there were no lifeguards, and they could swim out to the buoys that marked the end of the sandbar. My mom swam out ahead of him, and then stopped swimming forward, treading water, far past the point where her feet could touch the bottom. She was staring at the horizon. My dad says he saw something in her eyes, some kind of suicidal resignation, and had to pull her back toward shore. This story was used to illustrate the depths of what we (he and I) don’t understand about my mother.

I can understand this better than most things about my mom. When I want to be alone, I close my eyes and imagine myself plunging into a pool. Other people have a way of inhabiting my mind. I get their voices, and lines from my conversations with them, lodged in a nook, providing voice-over for everything that happens to me. Under the surface, with the heaviness of water on all sides, it is impossible to imagine myself combined with someone else. My mind, temporarily, unmerges. The cost of the clarity found in this solitude is nihilism: a recognition of death—from the feeling of drowning—and the sense that everything is arbitrary. From this, I derive a perverse sense of power, as if all the details of my life are laid out in front of me like a deck of cards, which I have the power to reshuffle. Last night, I turned my back to Oliver and imagined myself plunging.