There are six objects on my nightstand: a waterglass; a stack of four books I am reading; a stuffed animal—a crow, whose wings are stitched to move freely. I wanted to give it to the next-door neighbor’s daughter, but they were evicted and moved away before I could. The crow’s wings remain conversation with the child.

    I rub its head, body, tail, and two wings whenever I have trouble sleeping. I’m watching the stitching come slowly undone, watching the eyes of the girl averted, watching the bruise on my face where the stone of the father’s stare left its mark. Henri Bergson would say that tactile sensations, from touch or failed touch, permeate us.

    I keep three unopened poppy-seed packets taped to the kitchen cabinet’s door that I open every morning when I reach for my coffee mug. Each packet has a different poppy-field sketched on it that I walk into, and let myself get lost in, while my coffee brews. I don’t take them down from the cabinet, despite a sense of loss growing in them, wild thistle and weeds overtaking their orange petal-cups. Some objects have discordant inner volatilities that draw me to them, as if I’m intoxicated by their secretions of unease.

    Henri Bergson describes a patient who felt a pair of sharp scissors rubbing against his ears as he slept. They rubbed gently, at first. What the patient described was something that neither he nor Henri Bergson classified as a dream.