a distant drum of cold water

Another bad night last night.

I dreamed that, unknown to me, she wasn't gone at all - she'd actually been in a different hospital all this time, and no one had told me.

I was incredibly relieved to discover this, of course, and immediately tracked down this mysterious place where they'd been hiding her all this time.

When I got there, I discovered that her entire extended family was camped out in a giant bomb shelter/drainage tunnel underneath the hospital - the small children were running around, playing tag, and everyone was having a picnic, as if this was all perfectly normal, and everything was perfectly okay.

They directed me up to her room, somewhere deep inside the dark, windowless labyrinth of this monstrous, skyscraper hospital, and there she was, lying on the bed, still hooked up to all those awful machines.

I arrived, of course, just in time to see them taking out the feeding tube, and turning everything off. I'd missed her - too late by only moments - and she was gone all over again, but this time for real.

The doctor sitting in the corner of this tiny, shadowy room looked up from the file in his hands and spoke to me, smiling, incongruously chirpy.

"What they didn't know was gonna get him in the end," he explained, excited, as if this was going to answer all my questions, "was a distant drum of cold water."





And suddenly I awoke, at 2:30 in the morning, devastated and completely confused. That last line kept running through my head, as if it were somehow important: a distant drum of cold water.

What any of this means, I do not know. I have absolutely no idea. But I'm open to suggestions.