I'm at home tonight listening to the muted thunder outside my window and wishing it wasn't always so hot in my room. 2 fans and the A/C running and I wake up sweating in the middle of the night.

I have daydreams of a tiny house with the bare minimums, painted a sunny yellow in a kitchen full of wildflowers. Daisies, buttercups, blubonnets, Indian paintbrushes. The kitchen is spring. The den and the hearth are heavy colors dark and warm like harvest foods and soil. The den is winter. The bedroom is inviting and tragically beautiful, old furniture I have given a home and junk made into beautiful things on the walls. A four-poster squats in a corner draped in ochre sheers. The bedroom is autumn. The porch is open and faces west and the sunset and it absorbs the luscious green glow of summer's dusk. The porch is summer.

I also wonder a lot lately about human behaviors. In particular the urge to hold things that hurt us. Not just in a literal sense, but in an emotional sense as well. We seem to have a strange incapacity to move on from things and people and places that bring us that bittersweet melancholy feeling. I don't know why we do this or for what purpose, but I still wonder. And I'd like to stop doing it if I could.

She sits alone, kneeling on a richly stained oak floor. She is facing a mirror, large and round with scalloped and curving details. The mirror hangs in the air silently floating, small threads of glittering tendrils wrapping around it and in every crevice.

Brushing the surface of the floor with her right hand, she pulls a large knife from it. The blade is razor sharp and from within it, a humming metallic buzz whispers. Without ever taking her eyes off her reflection, she grabs a handful of dry and tangled red hair in her left hand. Slowly she raises the knife to the hair and sends it slicing through each strand as if it were made of water. No resistance. She relishes every infinitesimal snap as the follicles of every handful are severed, never taking her eyes from those in her reflection.

When she is through, she is surrounded by the remnants of her hair. A circle of red. She holds up her right hand and where there once was a knife, there now sits a flat circular rock. She breaks her gaze with the mirror to look at the stone. She has a memory of choosing it for a purpose. She remembers the first time she saw it, underneath the small corpse of a bird with yellow and grey feathers. No eyes. She remembered that he'd had no eyes. She had taken the piece of earth from beneath him and thanked him, though she didn't know why. It seemed appropriate at the time.

Shifting from her memory into the present, her eyes return to her reflection. Her shoddy hair, unruly and uneven, and the eyes that stared back into hers so diligently in spite of their dark and heavy lids. A moment or two passes and her eyes begin to lose focus staring through the mirror, seeing but not seeing.

A sharp and unwelcome music pierces the silence and rips its way into my dream.

Jason Reeves 'just wants to write me in a song' at 5:45 AM.

And then I woke up.