A Love Letter in Cuneiform

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Before Alice woke up, she had a dream that she was soaring or gliding. Any such comparison is of course too cheap to express the floating sensation she had. For a while she forgot herself. Then suddenly her heart reminded her, stopping short in the midst of its crowlike flight. She herself, though, kept to the hummingbird’s path of her thoughts, until finally she took a deep breath and said it: Tuesday. At that moment it was all she could think of, subsumed in it, being it. Her day had arrived and she had begun to get used to the scent.

Between inhale and exhale, between holding her breath and the sparkling celebrations of pain in her lower belly, between the inertia of sun-basking to a copper tone and oozing tears of sweat quickly soaking into the bedclothes, two spots appeared before her eyes. She had to force herself to inhale. With some concern. It wasn’t clear if the two dancing spots behind her firmly shut eyelids were caused by the contraction of her eye muscles and their pressure on her retina, or whether they might be viewed as something else … metaphysical, perhaps. After brief deliberation Alice decided for the latter. She completed the cycle of inhalation and exhalation, but no longer trusting herself enough to move, she lay motionless in bed, the spots circling before her still-closed eyes. One was the past, the other the present. It wasn’t obvious which was which, but either way she felt that this was the most present, most perfect, and certainly most sweet-smelling day she had ever experienced. Suddenly she realized: Yes, of course — it was the smell! If she hadn’t been in bed, her head would have reeled. The smell! It was the smell that woke her up. If not for that, she might have assumed it was the music drifting in from the next room.

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