From a dream last night:

I was sentenced to three to four years, which struck me as neither unjust nor just — simply the number that had been arrived at. But it did feel long. I found my bunk without difficulty after talking with my family. A woman helped me with my pack, and when I offered my name she received it quietly and gave nothing back. After a moment, she relented. I did not press her on the delay. There are thresholds one ought not to cross too quickly, and she knew which ones they were.

A man (the headmaster of a private school I cannot name) came to me bearing a scaled model of a section of a ship’s hull — a great British ship, ruined, one I recognized without quite knowing how. He placed it in my hands the way one places a wreath. His face told me everything his voice did not: you have done what was required of you, and you see what becomes of those who do what is required. I held the fragment. It was heavier than it should have been, and colder.

I was hiking, later — or perhaps free, I could not be certain the two were different. I carried things to a place that had the character of a dump without committing to the name. As I adjusted the tarpaulin in the bed of an American work truck, I recognized the distorted geography of my childhood neighborhood, with the mountain that dominated the valley oriented to the west, no longer to the north.

Men and women I had known before the sentence appeared at intervals along the road. One of them offered me a drink and recited its contents as though reading from a document: It has mint in it, he said with a hint of apology. I said yes as we sat at plastic tables in a driveway in a neighborbood of working class suspicion and dust.

I found myself telling someone about a girl I had seen, playing violin alone, perched on a fence in a long dusty lane with no audience and no apparent intention of acquiring one. I had known, even as I watched her, that a crow would pass. It passed low as I trundled down the lane. There is a particular quality of attention the world demands in certain moments, and I had given it, and been answered.

Then I remembered I had to go back to the prison. I went.