All last night I wondered lost through my dreams. My subconscious doesn't know a thing about subtlety. Just me walking rooms and rooms and rooms for a party I never quite make, though I find some of the people I'm searching out. They're always on the way to somewhere else. A couple steps ahead of me. There's an award ceremony I barely miss. More I walk the more there is. A maze of a warehouse, endless rooms expanding every step. A restaurant. A bar. A magic show where some exploding trick sends me running, smoke and fire at my heals. And then basketball and tennis and swimming rooms before I find the street. Not the right street. Or maybe the right street. Who can know if you exited the same door your entered when the building won't keep still? The car parked where I left my car is not my car. The sign that wasn't there when I parked says two-hour parking. Tow Away zone. And I'm up before I bother looking.

At the gym this morning I run the elliptical straight through to nausea, hard as I can, my legs go shaky and the sweat runs down burning into my eyes, but I can't run the restless out of my skin. Can't slip out of my body and can't keep still in it.

Just how it is inside this change.

***

Lila and me were working on shoe tying on the floor of her classroom after school. She got the got the first crossover pulled taut. I tried guiding her little hands one bunny loop through the hole of the other to finish, but the loops fell apart in our fingers.

She said "I love you, but you're not one of those moms whose good at teaching things." She meant I am not patient. She said. "It's ok, mom, you're the only mom I want. You're good at lots of other things."

She meant the way I can't keep still inside my skin, keeps me from teaching. I don't know what I'm good at. The way my insides crash against the edges of me, rolling waves that cannot break the boundaries of me and cannot settle.

I said "Yeah?"

She said "You're good at doing dishes."

***

My waking dream.

I sit on a rock river bed and swallow tiny smooth pebbles. Perfect stones formed hard with everything I am not. One by one. I hold them in my mouth. Here is patience. Here is calm. Here is peace.

One by one. They slide through me, cool and reassuring, the way you feel the path of water down work your throat. The way the first swallow coats your insides everyplace it touches, cools the veins.

One by one. Peebles settle in my toes and knees and belly, another and another and another stacking all the way to the top of me, displacing my restless, weighing into me something solid and sturdy. Something whole.