Wednesday, February 7, 2018
I was in a building that was part hospital,
part pre-school, and part office. There were people around that were familiar
coworkers. I deduced, therefore, that I must be at work but realized to my
embarrassment that I hadn't yet showered and, since there was a bathroom, I
decided that I had better take care of this before anyone found out. With this
goal in mind, I began to unpin my copious hair which fell in heavy mounds of
dreadlocks: Beautiful, thick, endless dreadlocks that kept falling and
falling and I kept unpinning and unpinning and I thought I'd never finish when
a coworker arrived. She said I was to remove my plants from in front of the
front door because the inspectors were coming. With my hair half unpinned, and
a bit nervous about these inspectors, I immediately attempted to attend to her
request, only to be blocked from my destination by changing mazes and piles of
shoes, dolls and baby items, even the door itself kept changing its appearance
until I could not find it. Then, a hospital bed appeared where the door had
been and it unfolded into impractical configurations as I attempted to operate
the levers and buttons. It was then that I looked around and realized that
there was a sickly person lying on a bed in the corner. She was frail,
flaccid and uncovered. She was wet, smelled like urine and had pressure ulcers
all over her body. She was falling off the bed onto the floor. I picked her up
and she had no bones. I flopped her on the bed and decided I needed to give her
a bath. I left her there, wet, cold, uncovered, unprotected and went off in
search of towels. I went back into the bathroom and there were shelves full of
blankets, q-tips, bibs, spoons, needles, diapers, but no towels. I finally
found two worn out rags and wet them with cold water. I went out into the
middle of the room and the woman (who was now a man) was up, dressed, robust,
and laughing with his family. He came up to me and kissed me, the cold towels
dripping water on the floor. I felt incompetent and ashamed.
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