Last night, near morning, I think, I dreamed - quite vividly - of the desert.

I was driving into it, and it was on both sides, but I could still see the not-desert behind me. Then the not-desert disappeared and the road was gone and the details of the dream blurred. Soon I couldn't see the landscape at all - couldn't see anything - but it didn't matter, because I knew I was happy, I knew I was where I wanted to be.

Which is not, necessarily, the desert. The desert is a representation, symbolic. I have dreamed of the desert before, in other times like this. I dreamed, a few weeks ago, that I was standing in a park near my home, leaning against a large rock. Beyond all the trees and green-fuzzed northernness, I could see a mountain. The bare kind. The desert kind. Until I looked away and looked back, and saw that it had disappeared into the clouds.

I think I am trying to tell myself something.

I think soon I might be ready to listen.

.."the world is always changing, and therefore deserves to be seen fresh every day."

I hate, sometimes, that the things I thought and said in yesterdays somehow follow me to today, even though I don't want them to.

Even though, really, they shouldn't. Because they so seldom apply to anything I'm saying and thinking today.

Sometimes I think I would love it if I could shed the skin of every yesterday while I sleep, and wake up with a fresh canvas to paint myself on every morning.

But it doesn't work that way, does it?

And not always because we don't let ourselves. Mostly, I think, it's that we don't let each other.