THAT DAY

My housemate Christopher wakes me before dawn. He's been vomiting all night! Dehydrated, feverish. Take him to emergency room. Sit all day at home waiting to hear the medical verdict. Feel trapped. Pick him up near sundown. Much better. But he'll have to take strong glaucoma meds. And needs a cataract operation. Eep!

Read most of Kelly Barnhill's The Girl who Drank the Moon. Strange fantasy about a sorrow-vampire who builds a whole unjust, unhappy town just to feed herself. People are so resigned and glum they don't even notice they're cows being milked!

THAT NIGHT

The teachers in my new art school are partisan, sharply split between a Trump group I loathe, and bland capitalist liberals I can tolerate but don't really like. I'm tired of being milked.

Deep in the art building, I climb a vertical submarine-like ladder through a hatch to the top floor. Emerge into... a party? Yep. Wine & finger food. Meet new grad students who ask what teachers I'd recommend. Only a couple I really like--find I'm warning against way more than I can honestly recommend. Then I spot my video teacher--forgot her! Grudgingly broaden my Acceptables from "a couple" to "a few."

My adviser, a woman I DO respect, shows me how to open & slip through the secret cracks in the side walls near the back of classrooms. She sends me laterally through the classroom block; tells me to go to the suite at the far end.

So I slip through the wallboard, between the studs, into...

A jammed yoga class doing shut-eye floor work. No way past. Wait till they all roll like dogs, and one is sloppy and opens a gap. Hold it with my leg, preventing her from rolling back--murmur "excuse me" as I walk across... into the next crack! Behind me, the yoga ranks reform.

A martial arts class is next. Smaller class, so more apparent room, but the moves take way more space; they can't all practice at once. Two sisters or cousins, both curly brunettes with angular faces, duel/duet. Like herons dancing! Admirable energy, but it's too severe & disciplined for me. I slip on around the room's edge to the crack in the far wall, and on into...

Ballet class! A crowd doing arabesques. Graceful, sexy. I love dance classes. But I trust my advisor; the only one who's never steered me wrong. She said the class at the very end. I sidle slowly round...

Funny, I only notice now that I'm not in street clothes or dance gear, but a big terrycloth bathrobe. Bare soles.

The last room, unlike the others, has windows all round, and curved walls, and French doors opening on a funny prowlike terrace as if the whole classroom block is a ship. Maybe... the Relation-Ship? Because this class is a love & sex workshop! Not just therapy, but a class in getting over shyness about sex performance, for eventual shows (live or film?)

A couple on a bed make out. Or actually fuck in public? Eep. And over on that sofa, two girls with legs entwined touch and talk quietly, nude under loose robes. One sofa girl's a mentor to the other, whose aura says shy. The mentor murmurs "You want sex?" stroking her mentee's slippery cunt. From her mild tone, she's ready to try quite different things if that's not it; not pushing at all. Wants her to have whatever she needs.

And that's what her student needs to hear! She never got that kind of generosity. Student says "No..." hesitantly. Does she mean it literally, or that she wants to be coaxed? Her energy says she's excited but not ready to fuck in front of strangers.

But nearly.

Interesting. I like all their auras, and despite the heavy subject, laden with so much baggage for me, I feel more relaxed here than in the other classrooms. They all clearly had strict codes I didn't know--and assumptions of normality.

But here it's taken for granted problems will appear no matter what--anyone coming to a sex class has issues, by definition.

Now I see why I'm in an open bathrobe; here it fits in. I sit near them in a big armchair. Unclear who I'm here to fuck, but clearly that was my teacher's purpose, to encourage SOME kind of sexual participation.

I announce "My advisor sent me through the cracks to join this class..." and wait to see what happens next.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• College as maze: huge, labyrinthine San Francisco General Hospital. That implies it's a complex about healing.
• Mentor points to a wall-crack, tells me to try the class at the row's end: at my college in the waking world, she was about the only one who didn't steer me wrong.
• Slip into cracks to find secret classes: In The Girl who Drank the Moon, she slips inside a Stonehenge monolith down into a secret archive of magic.
• Yoga: exercise in general? Or literal--there's a decent yoga center up the block.
• Taekwondo: not literal--my joints are too fragile, from Lyme and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Probably self-defense, learning to say no!
• Ballet: took for years, but also not literal now, for same reasons. May mean seeing my body as beautiful and conquering shyness.
• Skirt each room and move on: may mean either that these classes...
  1. are prerequisites I need to handle love/sex, OR...
  2. won't help much, but through such classes I'll find the right one; can't find it directly.
• Sex class: after two abusive relationships I did therapy and quit standing for abuse... but I still feel shy/hesitant. The last few years, health/survival took priority. The dream's arguing "Money, health, work & home are all stable now; return to love & sex. Unfinished work!" And it's suggesting a path.
• ACTION: try such groups! Yoga, assertion/self-defense, dance/shyness/stagefright. Odd path to love, but it may be the one I have to take. My dreams can't recommend a door to healing. Slip through the cracks!

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