Dream d277-s: Notebook entry:

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was on the first tram of the morning, the one that runs at five forty-three when the city is resuming and ceremony people are returning.

The tram was not crowded but it was recognizable. Not by what anyone wore or said. By how they sat. The people who had been inside all night had a specific relationship to vertical surface, to the seat back, to the window glass. They used support differently from people who had slept. Not collapsed exactly. More accurately: still permeable. The body's defenses not yet rebuilt after hours of collective movement. They were sitting the way you sit when you are between one state and the next.

I knew this from the inside. I had returned on many first trams. I knew what it felt like to be on this side of it: the particular quality of tiredness that is not unpleasant, the way sounds arrive slightly more directly than usual, the city outside the window appearing as information rather than backdrop.

Lano was on the seat beside me, which was not how trams worked but was how Lano worked. He was watching the other passengers with the same careful attention he brought to dance floors and canal walls. After a moment he said: "Volviendo." Returning.

All of them. The person near the doors with their eyes half-closed, the two people at the back who were not talking but were still coordinated in some way I could see in how they breathed, the single figure across the aisle who was watching the city through the window with the focused quality of someone who has been given new eyes for a few hours and is not ready to give them back.

The tram passed a canal and I saw the white shape on the railing of the bridge, facing the tram as we crossed. It tracked us the way it tracked sound sources. We were the source now. The ceremony was in the passengers, carried in their bodies, being transported home through the waking city.

This was the part of the investigation I had not named until now. The ceremony does not end when the music stops. It travels. It goes home on the first tram in the bodies of the people who stayed until the end. The circle dissolves as a place and reconstitutes as a distributed thing, carried in sixty bodies going to sixty addresses.

The crane had tracked it correctly. We were the source.

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The ceremony is portable. It travels in the body after the space closes. The first tram home is part of the ceremony, which means the ceremony's circumference includes the journey home. 回: return. The word was always about this moment too.