Dream d413-s: The List by Lamplight

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the inn was at the end of a gravel turning from the coast road, a two-story building with a painted sign I could not read from the road. The woman who let the room did not ask where I was going. She gave me the key, said the kitchen closed at nine, and returned to whatever she had been doing.

The room had a window that faced the sea. I could not see the sea from the bed, only the rain moving across the glass in long thin lines. Lano chose the foot of the bed and circled twice and settled.

The table was small, enough for the open notebook and a cup. I laid all four notebooks on the bed first, looked at them. Three filled, one open. The spines on the filled ones had all cracked by now from being opened flat against hard surfaces. The fourth was still supple.

I moved to the table and opened it and wrote for the first time since the kilometer marker two days ago. Not analysis. A list. What I was carrying.

The rain came harder against the window. Lano shifted on the bed but did not wake. The lamp threw a warm circle that did not reach the corners of the room. I wrote until the list was complete.

It took longer than I expected. The ceremony knowledge was in there, but more than that: the specific rooms, the specific moments, the Wireman's hands on wire, the underground passage and its exact smell, the coast road and the way the sound of the sea had been to my left for three days. The crane words: 回, 家, 路. The ferry horn that morning. The fisherman's rope.

At the bottom of the list I wrote: what was left behind. That was shorter.

Lano lifted his head once while I was writing, looked at me, said "sal" very quietly, and put his head down.

Salt. Yes. That too.

I closed the notebook when the list was done and sat for a while with the rain on the window and the lamp and the sound of the building adjusting to the temperature falling outside. One more day of road.

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Carried forward: The notebooks are the investigation. The crane words are the method. What I am going to the workshop with has already been made, on the road, in the rooms, in the clubs.