Chapter 23
Dreams on dreams on dreams, recorded by my tired hand in looping, clumsy letters, most of them forgettable nonsense. Riding up a mile-long escalator in a mall. Grandma Ruth telling me all about how she’d taken up water skiing. Opening my wallet to find a miniature family of frogs where my ten dollars should have been.
And then there were the ones that stuck with me. A baby Bactrian camel, giving me a lazy, whiskered smile as it bent its neck for me to pet it. One of those nightmares where you realize you came to class naked; this particularly horrifying variant featured the presentation I had to give the next day in theology. A bittersweet vision of holding a hand I knew to be Ryan’s own, vivid enough that I could have sworn I felt the warm press of his palm.
Meanwhile, in re
