There is a city in my dreams where every breath is dressed in watercolor jazz. Every surface is violet, every light yellow, and all drip with fresh paint. Every night is thick and wet. Every night, the purple bakery crouches next to the purple hospital across from the purple apple orchard where the wreckage of the purple helicopter I crashed one night in the 4th grade still smokes and smolders.
There is no place more timeless. Every mistake I make here I have made before and will make again. Every fear is documented and filed away to where it cannot hurt me. Every passion and every imagining, every guilty secret, every moment of memory presses into each surface of this world like a kiss. Here is my sandbox. Here, I recover and enjoy and change and create and destroy the pieces of myself that I have locked away. Here, I love again, and fear again. Here, I return each night to find each fragment of the dream just where I left it ages ago.

Here again.
I stand in high heels at the two-dimensional intersection, a setting plagiarized by a younger subconscious from a cartoon watched over someone’s shoulder at age six, then blurred into a post-impressionist painting like the world seen through the windshield in heavy rain. The green and sterile interior of the bakery an elementary school cafeteria dolled up in 1950’s decor. Inside, the pervasive smell of a hotel pool sticks to your nostrils. You hear the muffled mumbles of cars outside, yet the streets out the window are empty. There is only one car in this city.
In a chair at the counter, I watch the car again. It flies in slow motion toward the boy on the bike at the crosswalk just outside, rendering an explosive cacophony like canonfire heard from underwater. The boy is my secret grade-school desire, lying on the oiled streets beside his mangled bike; the car, a sea-green ambulance glistening with fish scales. Evidently, my younger self, far too innocent to conceive of such a dirty thing as gore, fails to bloody the scene. My friend appears cartoonishly uninjured, yet the atmosphere undulates with fear and urgency all the same as I rush toward the subject of my everlasting love to cradle him in my arms and weep his name. Then, the dream changes. The car is gone, the bike is gone, the boy is gone, and I remember that I have not spoken to him in years.
Lonely again, I wade across the street into another painting. A violet parody of Edward Hopper’s “The Nighthawks” embraces me, restocked with friends and relics from an age less real now than the dream I stand in. Here is the boy again, older, drinking a strawberry smoothie at the counter with my nanny. She is the smell of sweet candles and the caress of velvet and the light flickering from dangling earrings. She is the endless hours spent on the patchwork quilt on the futon in her violet bedroom, me begging for just minutes more with her x-box controller, sipping over-sweetened tea, wailing along with her alternative rock idols serenading from mixed CDs. Here in our painting, faces around us grow old and young and old again. Yet, this plotless dream lingers like stale time, and soon I am on my way out, and the swing of the door drenches me in cold maturity, and the lingering nighthawks are gone like a pale breath into the night. My nanny’s room becomes my elder brother’s room and then the guest room. Both are gone, as I will be gone, as the house will be gone and, soon enough, forgotten.
The dream goes now, as it always goes, to the orchard, and I follow willingly. Supplanted into the city as though fallen crudely from the sky, in this square of false green fabric lies a grid of lolipop apple trees. The helicopter still dominates, burning into the dirt and filling the air with the thick scent of gasoline. The great purple beast is an overlarge matchbox toy, its insides tight with miles and miles of twisted copper tubes and crammed with the cockpit where I cower as the craft nods and dives into the ground. Every dream-character, friend and family, had been tucked into the beast. Now, they sprawl out. Now, I am on the sidewalk next to the wreck, pinned to the ground. Now I am standing in high heels, dragging a friend along the sidewalk. This time around, my younger self has lost her former innocence. I can see it. I can smell it. Two dimensional faces of passers-by grin at me blankly and see nothing. The stern hospital watches silently, but nobody comes. Something under the wreck. My brother - my brother! I am lurching and running and screaming for aid.
Then, I am on the ground again, and something drags me. I am pulled to the side of the hospital, next to the gate. Here is a friend from a bygone era. As he holds me and comforts me in urgent whispers, I do not remember that, the last time I spoke to him, I told him I never wanted to see his face again.