Memories

Begin in Dreams

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In one dream, a dream encountered once each month or so, a password to an email service or to the office desktop itself can not be remembered. Or interruptions prevent typing it in within a fifteen-second countdown. He has been away from the office for so long—a decade—and he sees the voice mail light flashing on his phone, but he can not remember the four-digit access code. How many messages? he wonders.

Even without the password, he catches a glimpse of the waiting emails and they scroll without him touching the mouse, and he has a deadline to meet that somehow exists simultaneously as “just missed,” “about to be missed,” and “missed a decade ago, so why are you dreaming about a job that was three or four jobs ago”? Is this even his cubicle, anyway?

No bosses are visible, but unseen bosses are the only ones required in a nightmare.
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An Ideal Reader

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

(First, a note on the photo: I have attempted to set up photo shoots with Ángel, el gato de amor, my girlfriend’s cat, that feature her with my glasses and a book. Because hilarious. Ángel has made it clear—by pushing the glasses off the bed slowly, very slowly, super slowly, threateningly slowly—that if I could get away with this, the price would be very steep. I would be getting away with my life and it would be a cheap life from that day on. Thus the photo of the unknown cat above. Because hilarious.)

This first appeared in “Message in a Bottle.”

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Everyone who writes has an imaginary friend.

There is an ideal reader in my imagination, a figure who finds even my shopping lists and notes in the margins of books interesting. I have not yet actually met anyone who fits this description, but I keep writing, just in case.
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Tails, You Lose

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Tails.” I spoke the word with my out-loud voice. I ordered white tails to wear at my high school prom.

For many American high school students, senior year means at least two things: Graduation and Senior Prom Night (and the morning after). With no research, I can tell you that “prom” is short for “promenade,” which is long for “prom.” For naive bookworm me, the prom, far more than graduation or even theconstantthinkingofthoughtsabouttherestofmylife, was the source of many anxieties.

(There is an ancient cliché about how native peoples who live in the Arctic have 1000 words for snow because they know snow so intimately that they have 1000 words to describe 1000 unique realities. Replace the word “snow” with “anxiety,” and you have me. A thousand different anxieties.)
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