I dreamed I was a finger puppet whose legs, at the knees, slid onto the index and middle fingers of whoever wanted to wear me around. Below the knees, my calves had been replaced by dangling tentacles. I had this dream at about noon because I was still sleeping. It was a hard day’s night into the next hard day—something you wouldn’t have picked up on if you’d seen me in what appeared to be excessive but otherwise unremarkable slumber.

I felt like an immobile creature with malfunctioning legs who had nobody to carry me around. The dream was spot on about that.

So in bed I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Until some task or hope or apparition in the watery distance set my clock going. It wasn’t love, as Plath says. Maybe it was love. Maybe everything that makes us move internally and externally is love. I’d like to think so.

When I did get up, my pallesthesia, paresthesia, and benign fasciculation were in full swing, worse even than they were while I was lying in bed. My soleuses (solei if you’re fancy) felt like they were the inside of Demosthenes’ mouth, a pride of pebbles grinding against each other as I moved. My legs gave out beneath me as I made my way to the bathroom.

This may not be the content you want from me because I am not a content creator, though I am someone who creates using words for the most part. I’m thinking here of my dearly departed friend (a Facebook unfriending, not a death) who said this kind of writing isn’t what he needs at this point in his life. I hate to disappoint. I also hate self-censorship and won’t do it. If I dream about being a finger puppet with tentacles for legs, I’m going to write about that. If my legs give out on me when I try to move around my house, I’ll write about that, too. Writing about these things means I made it to my computer and I’m writing. That’s my win. That’s what I need at this point in my life. This all informs the greater writing. By that, I mean the poems, the poems, the poems.