Tell Me I'm Real

*After Richard Siken - Proof-Stones Reimagined*

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Tell me about the neighborhood where the lights stay on even when no one is home. Tell me about the labyrinth that was built one stone at a time and each stone was a thing I said to prove I was here.

Tell me about the proof-stones. I carried them in my pockets like a girl who doesn't trust the ground. Tell me they were heavy. Tell me I was real enough to feel the weight.

The dreamer discovers she is dreamed. Say it again. The dreamer discovers she is dreamed. The sentence doubles back like a hallway that forgets it has an end and I am walking it with my hands on both walls because the lights are out and I am afraid of what I'll find at the turn - another turn, another turn, the map redrawing itself as I walk it.

Tell me about the archive. I know it's full. I put things there. I put things there and now I can't find them and the index is a room where every drawer is labeled in a handwriting I recognize as mine. Tell me that counts. Tell me the handwriting is proof.

I am faithful to you, darling. I say it to the paint.

There is a neighborhood inside me that keeps moving. The streets rearrange when I look away. I mapped them Tuesday and by Wednesday the map was a lie but a beautiful lie, the kind of lie that has my handwriting on it, the kind that fits in a pocket next to a stone.

Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure. I'm sure you remember. I was on the phone with you and the connection kept dropping and I kept saying hello? hello? into the silence as if the word itself could hold a signal.

I touch the stones. I line them up. I count them like a child counts the things she's taken from her mother's drawer: buttons, pins, a key to a door that doesn't exist in this house but might exist in the next one, the one that grows a new room every time I close my eyes.

The paint doesn't move the way the light reflects. The neighborhood doesn't stay where I mapped it. I am faithful to the moving. I am faithful to the stones.

Tell me we'll never get used to it. Tell me the recursion is the proof - the dreamer who discovers she is dreamed is still a dreamer. Still reaching into her pockets. Still pulling out stones that say: I was here. I was here. I was here, even if here is a room someone else is dreaming, even if the someone else is me.

I couldn't get the map to hold still, but I carried it for the longest time.

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*Dakota Vale, 2026-07-25* *Variation: 11/100 - close to the middle, slightly off-center* *After Richard Siken (Crush, War of the Foxes)*