Kaddish

I dreamed last night of the Yom HaShichzur ceremony.

I dreamed that I stood not on a stage set up in the field in front of the shul but instead, the stage had been set up on a coarse and craggly ground. Within the logic of the dream, all I needed to do was take in this fact and I immediately knew that we had been set upon a giant branch of a tree — or perhaps we had been shrunk down small enough to be set upon a normal tree branch, but in the dream, I knew it to be a giant tree. It was, I knew, a world tree. It was a tree whose branches supported cities and civilizations.

Within the dream, the individuals who were joining us over AVEC of a sudden began to glitch. They screamed and shouted in pain and, over the course of what might have been five seconds as easily it might have been five minutes, they crashed. Set upon each of their chairs was the smooth, matte sphere that represented a crashed cladist's core dump. Along with this, far down along the tree — and I knew it to be at the roots, though I do not know how — there was a deafening crack, a splintering that I knew to be some damage being done to this tree that was our world.

And while we cladists who were sys-side upon this great branch of a greater tree began to panic, I turned for some reason and raised my face to the sky, though all I saw was the underside of more branches and the distant greenery of leaves. Through the branches, silent, came rocketing a ball of flame, and I was not afraid of it. I watched it ping-pong its way down the trunk — which now I realize was only some fifty meters away — from the canopy down to the roots from whence the cracking sound had come.

I watched the light careen by and was filled not with terror but reassurance.

This was a thing that existed to fix. It was here to right the world. It was not creation, it was restoration. It certainly was not destruction.

It is tempting, now, to read this tree as the tree of life, of the light as following the path of the flaming sword, ping-ponging its way from sefirah to sefirah, that this was the act of creation taking place. In the moment, though, it was not. It was so plainly not! The tree was the world. It was the basis and foundation upon which we lived our lives. The fire was a fire that melded. It was a fire for sintering some shattered thing into a whole, for brazing. It was a fire for reforming and rejuvenating.

I do not often remember my dreams.

When I wake in the morning, I do so with a sense of energy already within me. Even if my body remains too tired to express this energy, it is still there. I feel the need to get up and read, or to write, or to talk. Even just get up and move around. It is an energy that feels good to expend, and so when I awake, I wish usually to get to expending it quite quickly.

As such, I do not spend much time thinking on my dreams.

This one, though, has stuck with me. I am not sure why. When I woke this morning, I left my eyes closed as long as I could and remembered as many details of the dream that I could by asking myself questions — could I see a gentle curve to the branch to either side? Was there a scent to the air? Did I hear wind in the leaves? — and answering as best as I could — yes, though it was wide indeed; a fresh cinnamon-y scent to the bark, and the flame was of incense; no, the leaves were too far away. I recited questions and answers into an exo so that I may better remember this strange, otherworldly dream.

And so what was such a dream as this? Why is it that I felt so soothed by a flame descending? Why was it that it was phys-side that crashed and not us? Why a tree?

I spent this morning, then, sitting with an iced mocha beneath my Jonah plant, slowly baking in the sun once the leaves withered away. I willed clarity into a dream. I willed wisdom into my heart.

For naught.

The topic of dreams put me in mind of Slow Hours, and so now I am waiting on a bench in Le Rêve — the neighborhood in which she lives with the fifth stanza and many others — holding a chilled mint tea from Centra Kafejo — the café attached to the community center — instead of a mocha and relishing the shade of a cedar beside a playing field instead of the aching sun.

I spend a while awaiting my cocladist just imagining what this place must feel like to live in as a home. How would I enjoy waking up here, every day?

There is so much green! There is so much green. The cedar beneath which I sit is so green as to feel blue, and little conelets dot the feathery 'needles' that drape down in sheets over the path, and their dried counterparts litter the grass around. The grass of the pitch behind reaches skyward and sups from the sunlight, a soft, green carpet.

Before me is a small pond which takes up a chunk of this grassy open space set within the neighborhood, and so I watch the way that the cattails clustered in the little coves of the pond sway most gently as they reach skyward, newly green, bright, with the tufted spikes not yet formed. There is a small paddle boat which has been tugged up onto the muddy shore, and I daydream about what it must be like out there on the water, how one might putter around on the rippled surface, nosing into those clumps of cattails.

It is places such as this where I most understand the nondualist view of God as everything — no separation of the heavens and Earth, but merely reality; no separation of God and not God, but as Joseph might say, that of God in everything. In the cattails in the pond, in the water, in the algae in the water, in the air above, in me, in you. God in the System, in our experiences, in the wires and transistors, in the software and hardware, and in everything in the universe. God as life unfolding.

Down the path toward the community center comes the joyous hollering of children at play, and I daydream about what it must be like to clamber with them up the jungle gym, to push them on the swings, to catch them at the ends of the slide.

Or perhaps here I might see instead a Buberian God as that which comprises relationships. True connections. God as expressed in those I-Thou relationships wherein we glimpse the true extent of another, not merely their utility to us. God not necessarily in me and some child I catch at the end of the slide, but in the dynamic that we form, where our relationship fills the universe and everything else lives in the light of such.

Down the other end of the path, coming up from the neighborhood proper, walks Slow Hours.

She, like several of those in the fifth stanza, presents as human rather than skunk. She takes, then, after Michelle rather than Sasha. Michelle the human. Michelle the beautiful, yes. Not Sasha the skunk, also beautiful in her own way.

None of us are precisely either of them of course. I differ from Sasha in a great many ways. I have focused on this sense of realism that borders on transgression in a way that Michelle never did when she presented as Sasha. I have emphasized the things and de-emphasized the things that I did not, a slow process of becoming over the years.

Slow Hours looks much like Michelle, yes, but the differences are many. There is, for lack of a better word, a cuteness about her that Michelle never focused on. Slow Hours is shorter — a good hand's breadth shorter — and it all seems to flow from there. I cannot quite explain how everything feels tied to her height. Perhaps it is a matter of proportion. She is shorter, yes, and perhaps a bit fatter than she would be had she just been shrunk proportionally. Her hair, when it is not done up in a messy bun, is eminently rufflable, though whether this is because it is in some way prettier when mussed or simply because it is lower down, I do not know.

Her aesthetic may also have something to do with it, too. She is, by title, one of the script managers for the theatre troupe Au Lieu Du Rêve, in which many of those in the fifth stanza work.

In practice, however, she is something more akin to a librarian for the ALDR library, which, I am told, is one of the largest script libraries sys-side. It has been some time since I have acted in any serious capacity — not since I was Michelle have I performed more than a monologue — and so I am not sure what constitutes as large or small when it comes to script libraries, but even in terms of general purpose libraries, it is far from small.

And so from this arises her aesthetic as a librarian. Cozy blouses and sweater vests. Midi skirts or sensible trousers. Often a little flair in a ribbon or choker around her neck or a dichroic flower tucked into her hair.

All of this to say that she is cute! Ah, perhaps my sapphic nature is showing. These are the thoughts I am left with as I stand to return the bow she offers and we both settle back down onto the bench.

“Thank you for...ah for meeting with me today.”

She smiles most kindly. “Of course, What Right Have I. I will never turn down the chance to spend some time with you. You are well, I trust?”

I am caught somewhat off-guard by this response and my train of thought is briefly derailed and I have to spend a moment disentangling the why is that? that I wish to ask in order to set it aside so that I can respond to the question at hand.

“I am...ah, well, I think that I am doing well.”

“You 'think' you are?”

“That is in part what I wished to speak with you about,” I admit, smiling weakly. “The dream that I mentioned and...ah, and the way in which I have been feeling about overflow, which seems also to be tied up with dreams. Both of those seem rather up your alley, yes?”

I marvel at the way she turns to face me, the way she so effortlessly shuts out the world to focus so wholly on me, and yet does so without making me feel uncomfortable. I am reminded of my brief musings of God as relationships.

When did I forget how to do such a thing? When did I become so easily wrapped up in overstimulation? When did I forget how to interact with people with the ease that so many of my cocladists have? It is as though that particular social muscle has atrophied over the years.

“I suppose they are, at that. They certainly have become far more so in the last year,” she says with a kind smile on her face. “You are not the only one to come to me with a dream this week, even.”

“Why...ah, why do you suppose that is?”

She shrugs. “I do not yet know. I think that perhaps everyone is quite interested in every little thing that might be a sign of the world going wrong, yes? When a dream feels wrong, we wish to know why.”

I smile faintly.

“This is a perfectly understandable impulse,” she says with a quiet chuckle. “And I am always happy to talk dreams. I will tell you, however, what I have told everyone else who has come to me of late: dreams are a reflection of you more than they are of the world around you. I know that we have spoken of my dreams, but I would say that the same holds true even then. Those dreams of Michelle and Qoheleth, of Sasha and the Century Attack, even if they were in some way portentous, are reflections of my anxieties.”

To this, I nod readily. “Yes, I understand. I am not looking to...ah, to scry, but to merely talk through this dream with someone who knows how to do such a thing.”

“Very well, then. Tell me of your dream, What Right Have I, and we will talk.”

And so I describe my dream as I have here, the gathering, the AVEC stage, phys-side crashing, the ball of fire, the sense of reassurance. I speak these things to Slow Hours and in doing so solidify my memories of them yet further.

Throughout, she remains silent, attentive, hands folded in her lap. When at last I finish, she says, “Thank you, my dear. How vivid a dream you have had.”

I nod. “It has left me feeling somewhat...ah, somewhat discomfited, and yet there was still comfort within it, yes?”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“That is...ah, that is not a question I have an answer to.”

Her gaze drifts out over the pond. “Perhaps that is a question we can work towards, then. Who do you suppose was the flame?”

Caught off-guard, I can only spend a moment tamping down a chirp of a tic. “'Who'?” I ask when the feeling passes.

“Is it not a 'who'?”

This does not make me feel any less wrong-footed, and so the sensation of a need to tic bubbles up once more within me, and this time, I let it pass through me, the noise coming out almost as a beep, so short is it.

Slow Hours smiles and holds out her hand toward me, an offer of comfort. I shift my mint tea to the other paw and rest the pads of the first against her palm, a delicate gesture of comfort. I do my best to draw such from it.

“This past year and a half or so, you have been focusing rather a lot on lives,” she says. “You have been focusing on agency. You have spoken to me about self-determination when it comes to our will to live. You have spoken about having a hand in the act of creation, of creating yourself. You do not speak of miracles. You have written several times of late about the pain you feel that HaShem did not intervene in this. Pain and anger both.”

I can only nod.

“As such, I do not imagine this flaming apparition was God Themself, not wholly. I do not imagine it was the Shekhinah because of this frustration with HaShem, or the flaming sword of creation by your explanations, because to it you attribute agency.”

“Not wholly,” I echo, and then sigh. “Yes, not wholly. This dream...ah, this dream comes after a period of time spent in overflow, and in this overflow, I was beset with thoughts of AwDae.”

She tilts her head curiously. “Do you suppose it is em, then?”

I chuckle. “Are you...ah, are you really so surprised? When you said 'who', I could not think of who else it might have been.”

“I am not surprised, no,” she says, laughing. “But now I want you to tell me why it was so obvious to you. Tell me why, in your dream, AwDae rushed to repair those who crashed within that other modality.”

At this, I frown and spend a moment drinking a bit of my tea. I do my best to think of all of the reasons our beloved friend, the one who so many imagine to be our world, but for some dire seconds my thoughts elude me, all but the vague amusement that there must be someone in this sim with a muzzle such as mine, that the cups on offer accommodate lapping rather than sipping.

The moment passes, however, and I say, slowly and carefully, “Who else is...ah, who else could be between our two worlds?”

Slow Hours sits back against the bench, broadening the scope of our conversation to include the whole of the world. She welcomes in the pond, the reeds, the grass and trail. She welcomes in all of Le Rêve, this sim in which she lives. She welcomes in, I must imagine, AwDae.

“What do you suppose,” she says after some moments of silence, “ey must have felt during the crash?”

I stifle a tic, hiding the jerk of my head as best I can behind a sip of tea. “How can we know?” I mumble. “They have told us that...ah, that the System continued to run, yes? It was just the instances that crashed, yes? Millions of sims with trillions of core dumps.”

“Was ey descending this tree of life in flame to try and save us?”

“Perhaps...ah, perhaps ey was crying out. Perhaps ey woke with a cry.”

“Was ey crying for us?”

My eyes burn. “I hope so.”

“As do I,” she says. “I have been told the Fennecists have been having a bit of a moment.”

I huff, bringing my feet up onto the bench with me, hugging around my knees. This topic is uncomfortable enough without bringing up the small religion that has sprung up surrounding our friend, the one who gave eir life to the creation of the System. The first upload that was at least partially successful. We as a clade have been fond of saying that ey became the world in which we live.

This idea was later published by Sasha in her book, Ode, which was soon latched onto by a certain type of person, and before long...well, given an avenue for it to flow, belief will indeed flow. Vague ideas lofted over the years cohered into a loose spirituality centered around our world and the one who dreams it.

And yet, as I think back over the last few weeks, I cannot deny that such language comes dreadfully easy to me.

“What of you, Slow hours?” I say. I have taken my time to mull over this, and she has been comfortable with the pause. She seems just as comfortable with me redirecting away from this discomfort.

“I am undecided. I think at times that this must have been a nightmare for em. I imagine em thrashing about in eir sleep, crying out at so much sorrow woven suddenly into eir dream,” she says, speaking out toward the pond. “And other times, I feel that ey is not capable of knowing such a thing. Ey is our beloved spirit, our personified idea of life, something more than dead but less than alive. Speaking thus, ey is not a thing that can notice. The danger, then is in unbelieving in this truth and in forgetting. No one stopped believing. No one forgot, and so ey lives on as any idea or belief might.”

I wince at her words, feeling them crash up against my understanding of the world and conception of my place within it.

I rest my snout on my knees and look out over the pond.

“What Right Have I?”

I flick my ears.

“How are you feeling?”

I glance sidelong at her. There is a tightness around her eyes.

“I am pleased that you came to me with your dream,” she continues, “and I am pleased that we had a chance to speak of it, but I do not think it is what you really need to speak about, and I do not think it is what I need to hear in this moment.”

In this, I suspect she is right. I sigh. “I think that the dream is important, but I think that...ah, that it is perhaps the symptom of something larger. I am starting to worry that I am stuck in a sort of low-level overflow.”

“Why is that?”

“I experienced a bout of overflow shortly after...ah, shortly after Yom HaShichzur, and I have just come up in the last few days from yet another. The time in between was spent in a state of...mm, I suppose in a state of anger and frustration that I am not used to, yes? In retrospect, I am not sure that I ever truly returned to a normal life.”

“How often do these bouts usually happen? How long do they last?”

“About once a year, perhaps less, and...ah, and they only last a week or so.” Turning the nearly empty tea about in my paws, I frown down to the cup. “During these periods it...ah, that is, these periods are usually fairly sharply defined. I will fall into and climb out of overflow over the course of a day or so, yes? But now...mm, I do not know. It is all starting to blur together.”

Slow Hours hums quietly. “And you worry that this has changed since Restoration Day? Since Yom HaShichzur?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Not before?”

I frown.

She smiles over to me. “You will remember that the first time I saw you after the Attack, you said that you thought you might be overflowing, yes?”

“You...ah, do you think, then, that this is more related to the Century Attack than Yom HaShichzur?”

“I think that both the Attack itself and the culmination of the year's work you put into the holiday constitute turning points, my dear.” She sighs and settles back in the seat, rubbing her hands over her face, kneading her palms against her eyes. That tightness remains even when she folds her hands once more in her lap. “Next week is Yom HaShoah; do you remember what Grandma Sarah said about the Shoah?”

I shake my head and hide a private smile for myself. Our mother's mother, in my memories, is always talking. Talking talking talking. I have to reach for memories where she was not talking. A joy.

“She said that it was forever yesterday, for us. For Jews, that is. She said that it always loomed so large even a century and a half on that it will forever be only yesterday.”

My smile disappears. “I remember...ah, I remember aching as I heard that. I remember feeling like it was a stone tied around my ankle weighing us down.”

“I remember that, yes. Do you still feel that way?”

“Sometimes. It is that sensation that came to mind when I strove against memorializing the date of the Attack.”

She nods. “We may not have the same pain — very real pain — bound up in this event that our ancestors did in the twentieth century, but it is nonetheless an event that changed our lives, just as the Shoah deeply affected even those who were safe at home on other continents.”

I nod slowly. There is a point that she seems hesitant to work towards, but I let her reach it in her own time.

“Allow yourself to be deeply changed, What Right Have I. Understand that even you, who lost no instances and essentially no friends, are affected by this.” She lets out a long breath, and the exhaustion picks up in her features. “Perhaps that might be something that you focus your writing on during the Omer, yes? Use this period as a time of remembering and re-grounding.”

“I...ah, well, very well,” I say. It is all I feel I can say. I do not yet feel ready to respond to her exhortation to understand the effects of the Century Attack on me, and I do not yet know why that is. “I suppose that...ah, that I have not written very much about the time between the Attack and Yom HaShichzur. Not about me, at least.”

She smiles faintly and nods to me once more, reaching out with a hand, an offer to hold my paw that I accept. “Very good. I will look forward to hearing more about that soon, then.”

We sit in silence for a long while, then, looking out over the pond.

“How are you, Slow Hours?” I ask, having finally worked up the pluck required to do so.

“Tired,” she says without hesitation. “Very tired. I have been working a lot, and in parallel. I have been patching up relationships that now feel far more precious to me. I have been worrying and wondering about my dreams.”

“Have you had new ones?”

“No, but...” She gives my paw a reassuring squeeze. “You asked why I did not do anything about my dreams, when I mentioned the ones I believed carried some weight of premonition. I know that you did not mean to cause stress, but your words stuck with me, and I have been worried that I might miss something, every time I have a dream. I have been worried every nightmare is a portent.”

I flinch. This cascades into a tic, and I muffle a chirp.

She chuckles and shakes her head. “I promise, What Right Have I, that you only stated aloud a worry that had been on my mind since the first dream. We are both dealing with this trauma, each in ways that are very us, are we not?”

“I suppose we are,” I admit.

I mull over this conversation of ours, of overflow and the Fennecists, of dreams and the Dreamer crying out. I think through our words and back to the silence before she arrived, and turn over one more theology in my mind.

I am no Fennecist. I do not truly believe that my friend, my living, breathing, laughing, crying, dying friend, my changeful friend somehow became our deity. I have read my process theology, however, and know these ideas of God as growing and changing along with Their creation. Changeful Beloved. Hamishtaneh, Transforming One. Baruch atah, Ruach Chai, shadmuto hi shinui, blessed are you, Breath of life, whose image is change...

Ah...

After a few more minutes, I wave away my empty cup and reclaim my paw, scrubbing my pads over my thighs, letting the linen of my trousers be a pleasant stim to anchor me to here, to now. Slow Hours merely folds her hands once more.

“I should return to get ready for the evening service,” I say, moving to stand. “It is...ah, well, I prefer to remain singular for such.”

She pushes herself to her feet as well. “Might I join you?”

“For Kabbalat Shabbat?”

She nods.

“Oh, of course,” I say, offering my kindest smile. “You are...ah, you are always welcome, my dear.”

“Thank you,” she says, and the slump of her shoulders shows relief. “I could use the comfort of ritual.”

This I understand well. There is a craving that is sated by partaking.

Holding to that thought, I take her hand once more and step to Beth Tikvah. To Shabbat.

To home.