Gego went home yesterday . . . He didn’t want to leave! I had to take down his blanket fort on the couch, and when I did he tried to burrow under the blanket again. I was crestfallen when we put him in his little backpack carrier. He cried out for me! Well, he’ll be back soon . . . I am his uncle after all.

I awoke on my couch after noon today and had this heaviness on me. I’d slept restlessly. And for reasons I cannot explain, I had dreamt about the Polish flight attendant. In the dream, I was in a sort of office building, I think in the US. I was sitting on a leather couch in a brightly lit lobby, waiting for something. Across the way, seated in a leather chair, I saw the Polish flight attendant. I turned to my dream friend who, as far as I know is not a real person, and said: “Hey . . . there she is. That’s the Polish flight attendant I was telling you about.” She heard this and waved me over.

Sure as hell, it was her all right . . . but her face had a sort of veil over it, like a shadow in the center of my vision. I could not clearly see her face, only around it. She was wearing the exact same thing she was wearing when I met her in Warsaw a year ago. She was really sweet and kept asking me questions about what I had been doing since we last saw each other. I was so happy to see her again. I leaned over and hugged her.

And then that old familiar feeling crept up on me, and now in the dream I wondered where I was and how I’d got there, and why I was with the Polish girl of all people. Were we both waiting to see a doctor of some sort? How could we possibly run into each other like this, being that we live in different countries? She told me she’d never been to Berlin. Was I in Warsaw? And why was her face hidden . . . ?

A dream builds its own world. It is complete. It has a past and, as long as you stay asleep, a future. But once you start to question the logic of the thing, it’s over: your brain is going to realize it is dreaming, and then the whole thing swiftly collapses in on itself. I felt a little bit of a sadness looking at her just then, knowing it was all about to vanish into oblivion, and her along with it . . .

And then I woke up.

Now it is 4:15 am and I’m sitting here beneath the glow of my galaxy light and wondering at it again. I keep having dreams about people who are far away and who I haven’t seen in a while. Surely it must mean I miss them. But then what can you do? For me, missin people is a full-time gig . . .