I'll be picking up your petals in another few hours

[sovay]

And today is one of those mornings when I do not want to write anything, because either there's nothing in here or it's nothing that should be shared. I thought last week's cold had passed off, but it's congealed into a sinus infection; a far less prevalent occurrence in my life than they used to be, but it's still the single worst thing that can happen to my health without involving hospitalization or any other major change of states. I couldn't sleep last night; I couldn't work on anything, either. Eventually, I passed out and had shallow, fever-sharp, suffocating nightmares of a revenge tragedy of a composer against the bureaucrat who had been responsible for destroying his career, which sounds like my subconscious was still exorcising Collaborators, only with less humor. It was a play I was watching: it opened with a freak accident that claimed the lives of five people and then rewound to show you how carefully he set three of his students up as bait and cut the fourth out of his life, because she would have understood. The night before the blast goes off, one of the bait is reading a sudden delivery of mail that's been hung up in the toils of the post office, she's told; it looks like old unpaid bills, but she realizes the handwriting in each case is the same. It's the fourth student, trying to warn her in terms that won't either panic their addressee or provoke a terrorist scare if some censor reads them. She leaves most of them unread, uncertain whether this is some unsavory practical joke or a sign of real derangement from the shabby, contrary loner she remembers from earlier in the year, before the woman dropped out of classes or was asked to leave the conservatory or nobody really knows, except she hasn't been seen in months; besides, the concert is tomorrow, the composer's pulled so many strings they didn't know he still had to get her and the others onto the program with all sorts of important people in the audience, she can't afford to throw her chance away on the word of someone she never really knew or trusted in the first place . . . I cared very little about the two young men, but she was collateral damage that hurt: she screws up her resolve to play the rules of the political game, and they kill her. And the composer may, in a high-handed way, have been trying to protect the fourth student, the one he felt a rapport with, the one who figured him out, but he's left her with no place, no mentor, adrift in the system; she'll be even more disaffected than he, without even anyone to kill for it. The stage is full of boards and bodies (or at least their fragments) in the time-honored tableau of the genre, and she's playing on her violin the never-completed piece she brought to him at the beginning of the play, which he praised and then disengaged from, tending to his revenge instead.

It doesn't sound like much, but I woke and the sticky sense of being enmeshed in the dream wouldn't clear, the nauseous, useless dread and time running out in all directions, no catharsis. I did some hours of work and there's still a little of it at the back of my head, as phrases that frightened me as a small child used to stay with me, repeating like a spindle, hooking themselves in deeper. In my current state, I can't even use it for a story. This is not something I need.