In my dreaming I've lost my mind. I wonder if I've lost it while awake as well. Have I become so accustomed to what awake should look like that I know how to imitate it flawlessly?

I dream of boxes. Engraved, jeweled, oxidized, rusted, covered in mirrors and beads and dead flowers. Some are covered in skin, some made of the filed bones of children. Burned wood, icons of eastern European saints, obsidian and still smoldering lava. Boxes made of hands, by hand, of artists hair and a thousand layers of spider silk. Boxes decorated with crushed glass, sparkling at me as if winking like a woman with kohl rimmed eyes and secrets on her lips. So many design and markings I can't understand but am entranced by. They draw me close. Beg a touch. An exploration. They offer a kaleidescope of rarity and oddity and beauty. They know just how to seduce me.

And here I am with a bag full of keys. The kind of keys that delight me. I finger a key, memorize its' texture and weight. My test is to match. Each of these hundreds of keys to each of these hundreds of boxes. Inside these boxes are treasures for me.

Precious memories, bits of you that I'd stolen and locked away in case you ever came looking. Some will be filled with flies and leaches sucking at parts of me that I excised but still refuse to die. There are mysteries in these boxes. Great and small mysteries that unfurl like angry tongues and slice like piano wire. There is wisdom and Spanish moss and river water and fur from dead animals. Old jewelry, forgotten letters and kisses made in the beginning of love on cold streets. Springs and rivets and ropes from a ship in the Gulf. Stones from a crypt in Ireland and a rock from a tomb in Cypress. Amber scented paper and a jasmine rosary with whispers from her that night in a crowded bar. A stuffed monkey with interlocking hands and a wool blanket. Photographs, melted snow and bottles of alcohol from every country I've been to. There is music in that box. The sound of stars. I can hear it even closed and locked so tightly. Lessons live in these boxes. Taught and unremembered and ready to be re-examined. Rage lives in that box. Not yet spent, kicking and bouncing the box in a menacing way that is all too familiar.

And when I wake so sharply from this dream I'm calling out into the darkness in a language I don't recognize. I don't know where I am or who I am. I have to put my hands on the bed, the wall, in my hair and try to remember. Frantic in my not knowing, I scratch at my skin and try to claw my way back to myself.

I don't know why I am so afraid. I don't know what I am at all. And so I just breath. I focus on the in and out until I flood back into myself. A wash of what seems real licks at all parts of me until I am over-stimulated and filled with electricity. Unable to stay still, I hang my short legs off the bed and make my way to the bathroom where I violently throw up.

My hips are sore and my eyes won't stop watering. I feel only the shaking within me.