The child is gone, fled to a place with lighter breezes to sport billowing dresses. Reality grazes. Thoughts flower into bursts. The woman’s head morphs into increasingly complex sanctuary, a muddling of tones and the sharpening of skepticism. It is not an unpleasant place to be, though it tends to end up all-consuming. Even so, there’s less to hide, when one is stripped of layers of lace and petticoats. The cotton batting of the airy fiction stretches loose, allows for patches of the story run on higher stakes.

  On the other side of waking, the woman now inhabits the same plane as the rest. Even so, she wraps her mind in a different form of cellophane. A flow of flowering words and endless subtleties take hold, overlooked by most and mistranslated in their smallest details by the rest. At face value, everything is not as it appears. She does not hide beneath her own constructions; they’ll do evading for her. The crevice shrinks into a gap, and the excruciating closeness of them makes the knowing all more cringe-worthy. Still, the garden is a lovely place to be. Introspection will colour each perception, and when the world does not blur from all its frenzied motion, the light and shadow reveal skillful choreography. Dashes into open space will from now be staged, and only for excitement. The overall effect is comfortably detached, though these sessions do feel awfully obligatory. Humanities will crowd the woman’s mind too quickly; all that’s wordless will be worth their trade. Because once one lives too often wordless, pleasantries began to seem inane and confiding too much a form of charity.

  And yet, a kind of loneliness pervades that dips beneath the conscious mind to find home beneath its radar. It is a gnawing want that, once fulfilled, means much too little. Closeness is an illusion cast by empathy, and the woman functions perfectly without large doses of the drug. Hopefully no scientific finding will disprove her new mindset, because it seems it’s here too stay. Too many people in this world, and all them dawdle in a common pool of thought. An unfortunate circumstance for the woman who delights in strangeness: the choices are desperately bleak. For now, a chat about the weather will suffice.