Lara, Possibly a Dream, January 20 2019

I dreamed of a hub, like a subway station, with entrances on many streets. Inside were a church and a nursing home. I left my purse and coat and things in an empty room in the medical ward, and wandered and got lost. I stumbled across the church, a service just beginning. I heard a few words from the preacher and saw tidy, white, middle-class families filing in for something edifying. I thought how shallow and comfortable and blind this Christianity was, how disconnected from realities and suffering, the mess and need in the very same building. These people were here to be satisfied, to chuckle at jokes from the pulpit and be clean and reassured. The preacher was a young, pleased, popular man.

I kept walking, looking for my things. Finally I found the room, only now it was inhabited by a balding, withering, sparky woman. She had glowing bronze skin and dark eyes, and her name was something like Lara. I was hesitant to intrude, especially when I saw my belt was behind her head on the bed. But she beckoned me in, relieved to be rid of the foreign things in her room. I retrieved my purse and coat from the floor. But I was abashed, embarrassed to leave too quickly. So I started talking to with her. A friend joined me and sat beside the bed to read aloud from a book, and I took Lara's shimmering gingerbread feet, small as a child's, and rubbed them.