I wander around with this big rectangular mirror strapped to my back, larger than me, the reflective side facing forward. I love parties — actually, I adore them. The crowded ones, full of all sorts of multicolored people inside a house with a thousand different rooms.

But somehow, I always end up in the bathroom doing exhausting things. This time, the bathroom is large and square, and the bidet is oddly shifted toward the center of the room—for reasons, well, who knows. At least this time there was a door I could lock, though my father still managed to walk in, holding a little girl by the hand.

Parties are like a drug that blur my mind and make me forget who I am, what I do. I keep losing sight of people I know, and most of the time I’m just looking for them. In dreams, I have this undefined age, always young, maybe twenty. Is that the age of the soul? When you die, are you like that? Is it just my personality? Autistic, careless, antisocial, snobbish, annoying, curious?

And then there’s this non-physical quality of dreams, where you’re yourself even when you look different. Your father isn’t your father the way you know him, but you still know it’s him. Even if he looks the same, in the dream you paste that image onto him, because he is him because he is him, not because of that body. You can fly, move objects without touching them, time isn’t linear—everything happens all at once, or as a jumble of disconnected minutes.

Maybe that’s how it works after death—except you’re steering the dream however you want, creating the world you desire. So why come down to earth, why incarnate at all?

Because having a body is so beautiful that for a while we’re willing to give up the awareness of what we really are, and just for the sake of being flesh, we accept fear. Touching the body is wonderful. Damp, warm skin wrapping soft, pulsing flesh, the heartbeat, the flow of blood, the sting of a bruise. Touching, tasting, smelling both the sweet scents and the foul ones.

Listening to rain, voices, the wind, the sea. You can only do that when you’re embodied. Flesh is an irresistible call to the soul. Flesh teaches, it evolves the soul.

Today he told me I don’t show what I feel. And yet to me, I seem transparent. Like a bargain-bin Spock, maybe—I guess I avoid hysterics because I already drowned in them as a child, from my hyper-emotional mother, sun and moon both in Pisces. And yet, in movies, I see people with wet eyes, and someone out there must have had them, someone must have been the model for that look.

I wake up and the window’s wide open, the wind whipping the curtains all the way to the bed. And now, how do I get back to physical reality? I even left behind a beautiful necklace at the party.