My Life, Annotated; My Dinner, Missing

Last night I dreamed I was back in a college dorm, the kind that confuses scarcity with philosophy. The place ran on grievance and empty shelves. The communal kitchen looked like it had been looted by graduate students—half a bottle of soy sauce, a fossilized lime, and the lingering odor of arguments. The factions were loud, doctrinaire, and permanently aggrieved; the refrigerator was quiet and permanently bare. I kept my mouth shut. Hunger is easier to manage than other people’s ideologies.

A short walk away—dream geography is generous like that—sat my mother’s second husband, Baron, who has been dead since 2018 and therefore was very much alive. He wore a white football jersey and the expression of a man auditing eternity. He’d set up on a patio with a notebook and a stack of my YouTube videos, which he was mining for a college project. The topic: my life, the false stories I’ve told about it, the false stories about those false stories, and the small industry I’ve built turning all of it into myth. He watched, paused, rewound, took notes with clerical devotion. It was flattering in the way a tax audit is flattering.

Part of me admired the rigor. Another part of me bristled at the freeloading. There he was, piggybacking on my past like it was a group project I didn’t sign up for. Still, the man was thorough. He unearthed old footage, journals, drawings—artifacts I’d misfiled in the archive of things I no longer had the energy to remember. If diligence were destiny, he was on his way to a summa.

I wished him luck and went back to the kitchen, where luck goes to die. As I left, Baron called out that he’d put a beige bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the top shelf of the fridge. Help yourself. The promise of protein felt like a minor miracle. I elbowed through the crowd—everyone arguing, no one eating—opened the door, and there it was: the beige bowl, perfectly placed, impeccably empty. The eggs had been converted into theory.

So I stood there, starving, while somewhere behind me my life was being reduced to footnotes. In the dream, as in the waking world, the analysis was abundant. The food was not.