Rahul and I were lying in bed. A hummingbird was flying overhead, and he swatted at it, breaking its wing. I looked down at it–the grape-sized body covered in iridescent green and red feathers, the one good wing, the one broken wing. Its wings were like a dragonfly’s, clear, glassy, and stiff.

I was crossing the street to a garbage dump; I had something in my hand that had been tightly wound at one time with white thread, but the end had snapped. In the trash, I saw a piece of floss that would be perfect. I grabbed it, and then my eye fell on some of the other things in the trash: strings of beautiful stone beads–rough amethyst chips; smooth, polished pale sandstone disks pierced through the center; gleaming green malachite spheres–and started gathering them up into my arms.

I was going to the prom with this guy from high school named Kevin. He was an Asian guy a year older than me, kind of big and nerdy, with glasses. I can clearly picture his face in my mind, but I don’t remember if I really knew him and if his name really was Kevin because the dream-reality is washing out all my vague real memories of my friends who were seniors when I was a junior. He came to pick me up. “I’ll just be a second,” I said, and ran upstairs to find my dress. Something was wrong. I couldn’t find my dress. I started rifling through my closet, searching, and before I knew it, hours had gone by. He came upstairs, angry. I don’t know if we made it to the prom or if my search for a dress took too long in the end.