"I'm going to Alaska, to think quiet thoughts about my life and being a woman," I said to my old friend. We were on the phone in my dream. I was alone and had just moved out of my city apartment into a small room in a shared house. Chafing, confined, unable to breathe, stuck, and without mooring, I wedged myself in windows and waited patiently for nothing to arrive. Until I began thinking about the glacier. It would be blue, and huge, and somewhere between transparent and opaque. Cold, certainly, with rock-like properties. How my fingers would spread on its surface, but the small heat of my hand resting there would leave no trace. How when I pulled my hand away, it would burn red with the cold. How my lips and tongue would stick to the timeless ice, pinning me delicately. How its glassy surface would belie the grittiness on my cheek. How a forgotten eyelash might skate across its surface, how the glacier would not care about me at all.

At his wedding, he asked if I was still in love with you.  — Time is supposed to have its way with everything. —
I said nothing.
I said, let me have my secrets.
I said, it's my turn.
I said, if you love either of us, don't say a word.
My hair is thinner, my body is thinner, I have no place to hide them. My waning self.

My next dream was poison oak, breaking out in shiny red blisters on my thighs and palms. Red lip, red blister, red letter. I don't know what it means. "I've learned little from love, and less from losing it," she lied.

How long until all your blood freezes in Alaska?