The air in the room is weighing, a mental weight that tilts me just two feet to the left, where she went on ahead of us, and not easily. It’s a strange, dissonant geometry: a space anchored to a spot you hate because the person you love is sitting right there. You’re a tourist in a graveyard that your niece has forced back into a living room.

For a second, the a mind drifts, my mind, unmoored, looking at the stained and overused carpet where everything changed. Then she speaks, and the snap of her voice pulls me back into the present, mostly I suppose.

ME: (Coming to, the words catching up to the moment) ...And then I woke up again.

NIECE: (Not looking up, just existing in the space) What was the dream?

ME: I had a dream having a dream I had a dream I didn't have a dream. Just a Russian doll of nothingness. What about you? What's your favorite lately?

NIECE: I have weird ones. Friends of old friends that I don't have that much anymore. My friends that are nice stay nice in the dreams, and the ones that aren't… they just aren't. I don't really like myself in them. But do you ever remember them well? Like you’re in the same place? Where are you?

ME: (Glancing toward the window, anywhere but the floor) Not on the couch.

NIECE: No, somewhere else. Where’s the furthest dream? Do you dream you’re your at grandmas? Or at school? Or driving in the mountains?

ME: Sometimes I’m driving north along the Redwood Highway. It’s like at the house, but I’m moving back. I’ve been away a long time and I can’t afford to live in the same place anymore, so I have to go north. It gets weird. I drive west and it’s like Guerneville, but the roads are all wrong. Mountains and rivers that don't exist, warped visions. It’s the same, but it’s different.

NIECE: (A beat of silence) Do you ever dream about Kafka? Or powder? It’s all interesting. When do you have your best dreams?

ME: (The thought of the band she mentioned earlier flickers) Oh, the band was called The Garden.

NIECE: What kind of music do you like?

ME: Experimental rock maybe, but I don't know. A little of this and that.How many people were in the band?

NIECE: A lot. Must be more than two. I didn't see them. I don't know.

Me: huh? What?

NIECE: (She shifts her weight, looking at my feet) Did you go to grandmas for summer?

ME: No, I've been cash poor. What could I do? I've had holes in my shoes. I have not even been wearing socks; look! 

NIECE: Did you like those shoes? Sometimes I really like a pair of shoes you wear until they fall completely apart. Like you’re just a lot of socks and I can see your toes through the shoe.

ME: (Looking down at the repairs, the hand-stitched reality of things) I had one pair that fell apart. I sewed them back together. Now they look great. People look at them and ask what happened, and I just tell them, "Life's expensive. I gotta make things last."

NIECE: (Nodding, accepting the logic of the repair) Okay. Yeah. It’s okay.

ME: They work just fine. Thank you.

"They work just fine," I repeated, mostly to myself. "The shoes. They work just fine."

I stood up, the weight of the drive home already settling into my aging joints. I hate that drive. It’s not just the miles or the traffic or the way the car starts to speed over the asphalt; it’s the distance, the time in a certain direction.

She’s been gone almost five years now, gone beyond anything measurable, beyond the warped roads of my dreams or the thoughts that don’t exist in an ordinary way. But sitting here on this couch, two feet from where it happened, she feels like a radios static frequency I can almost hear.

When I get in the car and start it, I’m the one forcing the distance. Every mile I put between this house heading to my own is like manually pulling a thread out of a tapestry. I drive south and the connection thins. I feel it less and less with every exit sign, and I hate it. I hate that my brain lets go of the hurt the further I get, because the hurt is the only thing that proves she was ever here, besides my nieces of course. It hurts to stay, but it’s a different kind of agony to drive away and feel her fade into the rearview.