my little one, i dreamt you. i loved your mother and you came to me in a dream. i saw you and heard your laughter. i saw you in a dream and suddenly you were here.
and you are everything i had imagined, you are everything i had hoped for. i dreamt you and you became real. i dreamt you and you came to me. you came to me and i became real too.

the world moves like this, small little steps of intense focus and blip it is gone. it comes much easier than this. the man sits across from me and says delightedly, strippers come to me from miles abound. i note the intonation and refile through useless notes that turn me blind. my friend says, this is all very surreal and i reply, i know, we’re going to become a different class of people aren’t we? and in a matter of hours my three year old turns four and already she is unknown me, a mysterious animal with much charm and beauty and great potential for violence. these are exciting times, i tell my lover, i’m quite nervous. and she says, it’s all like a dream come true.

i sputter about, half mad, half exhausted, a pinwheel run amok. between desire and disgust, i look in the mirror and finally recognize myself, i truly see myself. grizzly, barbaric, poetic soul in the trappings of a beast. my skin is is my own. there is no redemption, only the constant yearning for it, only the constant attempt. try again. fail again. try harder, fail harder.

the truth is i do not spend enough time with them, i am caught up in my own obsessions, in my willful emptying of space, place, in disappearing into the circuits, into the nonsense minutiae of rights management and authentications, the technology of disappearing or disappearing into technology. i fall asleep exhausted into my daughter’s arms, she grasps me through the night, and i sleep and sleep and find rest. my son, my daughter, my wife, all in my arms, a perfect dream

every dream has its consequence, some unforeseen cost that can not be accounted for. my mother traded her life for a man that promised her a new world in which he song abandoned her in. and now as her older siblings begin to endure the ravages of time, she weeps because she can only console them thousands of miles away. i gave up a life of words and letters for some sort of normalcy only to lament how precarious and tenuous that normalcy actual is. every dream has its price, if only it was matter of how much sleep could be devoted to it.

it is ok to delete this post, to wipe it from memory. your daughter struggles with the attentions her newfound brother steals from her. she tosses and turns through the night knowing that something has fundamentally changed. my son gargles and razzes and shrieks like some mad miniature godzilla stuck to our hips as we saddle him around the house. a thick snow blanket over night swaddles our home but my daughter loses her mind at the sight of me stumbling awake. she tugs and pleads and never stops dancing from corner to corner. timidly, her eyes on the tv screen, my wife whispers, do you still like me? you cannot delete this, no matter how much it hurts. it will always radiate outward, it will always overwhelm you. it almost cost you all this.

there is a wound i’ve tended to for a very long time. full of pus, a sore that could not heal. and i poured vinegar and salt on it to keep it from healing. but the wound reached outward and split open the lips of people that i love and i found myself weeping as if i had been the victim when the truth was that i was the cause of it all. she reaches out to me in the dark because she needs me to believe. and in the dark i hold her to learn how to be someone to believe in.

months later he realized why he could never let go of the sensation that he had already met her. he had: in a different place, a different time. and she had destroyed him then, broke open the world and revealed it all for what it was. she had taught him the second lesson, the first being handed down to him from his father. he had become estranged to it all at that point, a violent trembling that had racked through his body and he had been so terribly cold that his teeth had chattered in the spring sun. the last lesson would be the one he taught to himself, the turning away without stopping.
all that has been written on you, will happen again, and by your very own hand.