APRIL

It’s as if the two keep swapping places behind my back.

There have been many many moments where I’ve sat somewhere I never imagined I’d be, a street in a city I’ve only seen in films, sunlight hitting in a way that makes everything feel charged, unreal. I’ve had to remind myself: you are here, this is happening. And yet it feels so improbable, I half-expect to wake up in my bed with the day as dull and familiar as yesterday.

Other times, ‘real life’ feels dreamlike in the opposite way … foggy, disjointed, as though I’m moving through it on autopilot. Walking streets I’ve walked a thousand times on repeat, Conversations blur, doing laundry, washing my face. It’s like reality has been replaced with a thin imitation of itself.

It’s like standing on the seam between two fabrics, one woven from waking life, the other from dreamstuff and feeling the threads bleed into each other. Objects lose their outlines; faces feel like déjà vu before they’ve even turned toward you. I can’t tell if I’m remembering something that hasn’t happened yet, or if I’m living through the ghost of a memory. Time folds in odd ways, like a book half-closed but still being read. And somewhere in that fold, reality exhales, dreams inhale, and I’m left swaying in the middle.

I think the mind does this to keep us unsettled enough to keep moving. If reality stayed too solid, we might stop paying attention. If dreams stayed out of reach, we might stop chasing them. So they swap .. not because we want them to, but because that’s how they keep us wide awake.