Snowflake

by Louise Nealon

Ocean. Say it out loud. You can taste the sound of it in your mouth. The word ocean comes from the name of the Greek Titan Oceanus, a great body of water that wraps himself around the earth. No matter where in the world water is, it eventually finds its way back home to its own body where it can be rocked to sleep in the steady breath of its waves. The ocean is where water dreams.

Water

When we fall asleep, we go to a place where words dissolve and become meaningless, like rain dropping into the ocean. As soon as rain hits the ocean it is no longer called rain. As soon as a dreamer enters a dream there is no longer the dreamer. There is only the dream.

Rain

craic

cruciate.

When I black out, I don’t dream. I wake up hungover, but a hangover is predictable. I know how I’ll feel. Fragile, but also myself. A nice, easy, childlike version of myself who thinks a glass of water is the most miraculous thing on earth.

Drinking

craythur

“Well, people are afraid to be ignorant,” Mam says. “And they are uncomfortable with the thought that when we enter the deepest levels of a dream, we break free of ourselves. Our society is so fettered to the idea of the individual. Real inspiration comes from outside of ourselves, the communal, that which we don’t know, that which can exist only in dreams. Mozart composed directly from dream states. Kafka wrote exclusively at night. Even the molecular structure of DNA was discovered in a dream.” She throws her hands up in the air as if to say, “What more proof do you need?”

Dreams

We go down twisty roads until he orders me to pull into a driveway with high stone walls and big fuck-off gates. The place is called Ballymore Manor. There’s a smaller sign that advertises HAPPY FACES MONTESSORI AND PLAYSCHOOL—NOW ENROLLING!

Montessori

Browsing in a bookshop is a lot like collecting shells on a beach on a really good day. I want all of them.

Books

I had a good sleep last night. The dreams are still there, I’m just able to let them come and go. Xanthe bought me a bag of Guatemalan worry dolls that I keep under my pillow. Mam gave me a framed quote to put in my new bedroom, to remind me that we all live in each other’s shadows.

Connection

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine

Irish

I’m dressed in someone else’s clothes that I found in a charity shop last week. I find it comforting to wear clothes that already have a history of their own. “I’m really happy,” I say to the girl in the window. “I’m really fucking happy.”

Second hand clothes

Mam has been meticulous in her planning of the trip. She wrote to her second cousin Judy to ask her where the key to the holiday cottage is hidden. Judy occasionally writes letters to Mam on a typewriter and encloses a tarot card in every wax-sealed envelope. She wrote back to Mam straightaway and told her that the key was kept in the decapitated Buddha in the garden.

Tarot