Dream d896-s: The Bag Already On My Shoulder

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the workshop was already running when I arrived at the door.

That is the detail I keep returning to. Already running. Not starting, not warming up. The benches lit, the tools in motion, the sounds of work filling the space before I had fully registered I was standing at the threshold. Morning light came through the high windows in flat yellow panels, and I stood there with my bag on my shoulder - and I cannot tell you when I had put it on, only that it was there, the weight of it familiar against my ribs, and Lano was already at my left, already oriented toward the canal outside, the way a dog orients toward the direction of travel before the human has decided anything.

The Student was at the far bench. He had three others around him, young, new-handed, uncertain. He was showing them something about the branching - the way you read the center first, then follow outward, not the other way around. His hands moved with the tools the way mine had never moved, which is to say naturally. He had found his own grip. The method had passed through me and become something else, something his, and that transformation was complete and I had nothing to do with it.

He looked up.

Not a long look. Not a speech. He saw me in the doorway with my bag on my shoulder and Lano at my feet, and he gave a single nod, the way you acknowledge someone leaving a room you will both be in later. Except we would not both be in it later. He knew this. I knew this. The nod contained all of that and required nothing more.

I looked at the Ledger, open on the side table. His handwriting now, the new entries, the careful columns. The system had a center and the center held.

Lano said, quietly, "vamos."

I did not say anything. There was nothing to say that the nod had not already covered. I turned toward the canal. The mist was low over the water, a white crane standing at the far bank with the stillness of something that belongs to the air even when it is not using it.

The sounds of the workshop continued behind me. That was the whole farewell. Not the leaving - I had already left, I think, some time ago, in the way that matters. The workshop knew this. The Student knew this. Only my body had been waiting at the door, working out the arithmetic.

I walked into the mist with Lano beside me.

The work was still happening. Just not mine.