Lessons From the Kissing Booth

I dreamed of flying Cadillacs, burning, and you standing under them letting the ashes sift softly on to your umbrella. You didn't understand the screaming or the panic around you, strolling and whistling softly, as though the chaos and the flames just over your head were nothing out of the ordinary. From where I stood, in a window across the street, you seemed a quiet island, and I wondered about the peace you hid under that umbrella.

Awake in empty rooms I see faces from the corner of my eye, in bushes and under streetlights and in the center of spider webs, and I worry about Charles Bonnet Syndrome or whether it is just too much time alone with my books. Surely, if I were going blind, the lady would have noticed while she was peering into my head just a few weeks ago. Maybe my brain is bored, and my visual cortex is playing its own game of solitaire. There's always been only a little bit of a divide between how the landscape looks in my sleep and how it holds itself when I'm awake, and maybe for a little while that line is blurring, spurred on by the spring and the grief and the lack of sleep.

I always have trouble unseeing secret images once I know they're there, in magic eye posters and Dali paintings and Rorschach blots. Patterns refuse to smooth themselves and the image looks like an old woman and a young woman at the same time. Of all the things I could be seeing everywhere, faces are definitely not the worst.