Fish Tales

I dreamt of fire twice last night. In the first dream, someone I know very well was reenacting a story of a man who died by fire and she lit herself on fire to show me how it happened. She continued to tell the story as her skin charred and peeled away from her body and as her limbs fell off one by one. In the second dream, I stood in the living room of my house and watch as a wild fire crept closer and closer to my home. The fire moved quickly like the cloud of destruction we see in movies after a nuclear blast. I was on the phone with my father giving him a blow by blow account of what I saw: people running for their lives. By the time I realized the fire was upon me, it was too late to run. I remember vividly feeling the heat of the fire on my skin before it consumed me.

Today, I made a second pot of coffee for myself. I rarely drink more than a half a mug of a coffee a day. But lately, I crave it all the time.

Tomorrow, we are leaving to spend a long weekend in a town called Mammoth Lakes located somewhere in the mountains of Eastern California just shy of Yosemite National Park. This is my attempt at little R&R before finals. Regroup and recharge.

I dropped my wife at the airport this morning where she boarded a plane bound for Baltimore. I kissed her goodbye and told her I would see her next week. It didn’t really hit me until this evening that she would be gone for an entire week. We have been together pretty much every day for the past 2+ years. Now that she is not here, I have no idea what to do with myself. So I thought, “I’ll just do things that I can’t normally do because I am not often alone in our home.” After squatting a grumpy with the bathroom door open, I was fresh out of ideas.

This is going to be a long week.