last week i had a dream––tell me what this means..

it’s sometime after midnite, and i find myself perambulating the golden gate bridge alongside my parents. we are somehow upon a hidden arc of the span––a tight, ostensibly geometrically impossible U curvature we have never been permitted to traverse before, merging into the straight expanse of the bridge. we navigate the arc, proceeding along its curvature in quiet wonder..

when it is time to exit scene, i observe another version of myself—donning red tapered pants and distressed sweater—setting off in haste, though he remains bound to me energetically by a faint tether of light. he slips irreverently into a stygian vehicle, strikes ignition, and pulls away with sudden urgency..

yet when he has traveled scarcely seventeen feet, the car erupts violently, emanating a fiery explosion against the aureate nite sky..

i am overcome with shock and apprehension—yet at the same time i carry a strange certainty that he is alive. i rush toward him reflexively, wrench open the car door, and smother the circumambient fire with my bare hands. he steps free from the wreckage, singed, distraught, disconsolate, but whole..

nearby, someone—perhaps a relative—moves to place a call, to explicate or escalate what has transpired, and i stop them..

maybe the moment required only empathy, not exposition..