Emotions as Dreams

“Clear your mind and get a hold on yourself and, as when awakened from sleep and realizing it was only a bad dream upsetting you, wake up and see that what’s there is just like those dreams.” - Marcus Aurelius My sister called on a Tuesday afternoon in October, and in the eleven seconds it took her to say the word cancer, the room became a different room. Same walls, same window, same gray afternoon light- but everything had tilted one degree off-axis, the way a painting hung slightly crooked makes an entire wall feel wrong. She told me later that the whole ordeal felt like watching her own life on a screen- the hospital gown slipping off her shoulder, the doctor’s pen scratching a clipboard, the fluorescent buzz overhead. She was there, and yet she wasn’t. Audience and protagonist simultaneously, trapped inside a story she wasn’t aware she was starring in. Years later, standing in the wreckage of a different devastation, I recognized it again. A relation…