Acrylic, 8” x 8”, Framed

2032

By Julia Talen

When I became a writer in 2032 I began to worry more about what people would think of me. How much they would think they knew about my life and my identity through reading my books. How they wouldn’t understand that the “I” I write with isn’t the “I” I am. My thoughts strung spirals, tangled like Christmas lights left in a paper box at the back of a staircase closet. I sunk into these tangles and began dreaming the same dream every night, another sort of tangle. In the dream I am a white rat because it is the year of the rat. And in the dream I am empty, longing to be a child. I am dropped near a snack shack at a public pool with water slides. There, I find all sorts of candies I ate as a kid--Fun Dip packets, sour gummy straws, Hot Tamales, and every flavor of Ring Pop. I taste all of the candies and the tangle in my mind becomes lightning, fireflies, the aurora borealis. The space light reaches for my eyeballs, plucks them out and places them as planets in a galaxy. I see myself floating with the cherry Ring Pop, an oracle, as the tangle quiets, turns small, a speck. I remember the first time I put my toes in ocean water. The last time I watched the sun turn the clouds pink then purple then bluish gray. I’m in the clouds for a while, soft, buoyant, closer to the stars, until I wake up to myself.