I wrote a book where I tried to make sense of my life, or where I tried to distinguish my life from my dreams, because in the moments just after waking, my dream life and my waking life were starting to feel confused. In the past few years, while I tried to write my dreams down, I would often do this as an effort not to “lose” them, but when I turned to my waking life, it felt like certain things were still becoming lost, though maybe not in the same way. For example, when I turned toward my life, I felt the weight of something behind me in almost everything I did, not just because I was beginning to move away from my dreams, but because there was a quality in my days that made moving feel different, there was an edge I had not anticipated when I walked. When I pulled a piece of bright fabric over my head, or when I went to visit a friend walking across the park, I thought these small gestures would never feel the same, after the past three years. When I wrote down a dream in the morning, I was also writing down a question about the past, though the future was where it mostly landed, and when I thought of the future I did not know where to look so I sometimes closed my eyes. I thought that in the small period of time it took to render the dream into writing, there was a horizon I could feel that made my body more awake, and through this I could say things more freely, and that moved in many directions simultaneously, so when I said “past” or “future,” for example, they would in their trajectory often touch. I imagined other words here, too, and the word “firsts” seemed to stick because it was funny—how does the original originate, how could something have been the first time?—so in the book I tried to remember them, like the first time I saw slow motion in a movie, which happened yesterday when someone described the first scene of L’Eclisse, and in trying not to lose these moments I thought I could also direct a wish outward, and the pages came faster than they had in a while, and though I felt I should keep going until I had exhausted something, I also felt I was done.