As good an indicator as any of how I'm feeling, I suppose.

This morning, in my dream:

My family was parked in a conversion van in a parking lot outside a strip mall. We were on the edges of the lot, near a fast food restaurant, where there were a few trees on a grassy island in the middle of the asphalt wasteland.

One of our old neighbors, a boy named Nick who used to live downstairs from us (he was younger than Tyler and I, and Spencer wasn't born yet, in real life), was in the tree and climbing out to the farthest branches. The ends he climbed out to were practically twigs; he started playing and swinging from them.

I waited for the inevitable – for him to come crashing down from the second-story height he was at onto the grass or pavement – helplessly. When it happened, I turned to my mother in desperation and asked what we should do. Nick moved semi-randomly, his arms and legs flailing a bit then stopping, and I couldn’t tell if it was his nervous system or voluntary movement.

“Just leave him there,” my Mom said, surveying his movements nervously. “This is what it looks like; this is what it’s supposed to be like when they fall.”

He looked hurt, and I didn’t see how he could survive intact without any medical attention, but Mom had experience in this, somehow, so I deferred to her judgment and we left him there, fluttering his arms like a baby bird fallen too early from the nest.

*****

This is about Spencer, of course, at boot camp.