I wake up. I will not sleep anymore tonight.

It was that damn country rd. and bridge rd that freaks me out. The one I have driven too fast or plunged off several times in dreams. The bridge is up a hill and on the side there is a dirt rd. that turns off of it to parallel it on a hillside, past the white house (that’s how I know that it is the same dirt rd. In the country all rd.s look the same, but each white farm house had different trees etc.). In dreams I have, driven or slid and ramped, fallen off both. Tonight, for the first time, the bridge was barricaded and the workers flagged me down, I was able to slow down, stop and go back. I did not careen off the dirt road either.

The family was visiting relatives My uncle, I think, was dead. His youngest son, the only cousin I would say I ever had a relationship with, was there…somewhere with me. I remember there being an old green bottle in my hands, thick and heavy shaped like a liquor bottle, I remember I seemed to have seen something in it, and in my head (like a thing possessed) I heard “I will be with you tomorrow”. I told my cousin because I thought it was his dad… Spooky enough.
Then there was some other stuff, like night curling up in the not-as-expansive-as-it-was-when-we-were-little back seat of the car (the Grand Marquis station wagon from my childhood) with my sister and we were wrapping ourselves in blankets to stay warm.
Then I’m alone, and there is the bottle in my hands again and there is a pinch on my thumb, and the pin prick of blood that forms as a half pearl on my thumb print some how binds me to the bottle, and I am drawn inside, I think of the ghostly words I passed on to my cousin “I will be with you tomorrow”, I panic that maybe they weren’t meant for him, and from the 3rd person eyes (or perhaps my own before I am sucked in) I see my hands inside, seemingly disembodied, pressed against the thick deep green glass…