What Dreams Can Do (Part I)

When I was 17, my mother told me I had a mystery father on the east coast, but I should never find him while she was alive. That night when the father I thought was mine came to take us to dinner, a glass wall seemed to separate him from me. And my mother began attributing anything wrong with me to my "genes." The sister closest in age never stopped saying that I had "bad genes."* The families (over a dozen half sisters and brothers and step-sisters and brothers) were broken. One afternoon I saw the difficult sister on the bus. "We're just different," she said, which meant what it always had. Then I had a dream. In it, there was a gift on each step of the winding staircase that led to my apartment. Each gift was one of my gifts: art, writing, dance, laughter and love of all music. When I woke, something in me had begun to heal. This is what dreams can do.