“The other night I had a terrible set of dreams.”

The other night I had a terrible set of dreams. I can’t remember the details clearly, but everyone I encountered had this quality about them, as if there was something they weren’t saying, something they felt guilty about. This happens sometimes when I recall a dream, the narrative details become a fog in the background and what really sticks out is the sensation.

When I struggle to articulate a dream from memory, I wake up and record the dream, trying to access it in feeling instead. It’s exciting to try and figure it out when I should be sleeping. There’s something seductive about typing away in your bedroom at inappropriate hours. I’ve always admired people who get a burst of creative energy at midnight and stay up into the morning, grinding away at something secret, something personal. Writing in the morning feels so corporate. Like wow look at me waking up early and getting straight to work. Good girl.

As I wrote, I tried focusing on the dream’s sensation, conjuring up some language from the physical memory. It felt like trying to capture a changing season into words or describing the passage of time. You can’t see it and yet you know it is there, ineffable and moving rapidly.

In Imogen Osborne’s story “Ten Fingers” the narrator is skeptical about the purported beauty of motherhood and watches her body move as if from a distance, pregnant and at a crossroads. Her life becomes distended, an internal pressure forcing itself out. Every page simultaneously pulls you closer to and further from discovering where she might settle. There is a familiar isolation in this crisis of decision making and the narrator must confront the reality in which she has found herself. Reality is hard to face in part because you can’t neatly make sense of it. Even when you take focused steps, live a life that is practically procedural, you still will find yourself moving towards something devastating. This can’t be my life, can it?

When the narrator says “babies made me think of gridlocked traffic; of irreversible endlessness.” It feels both precise and hidden. This undefinable tension that she lives with informed the way I approached my edits. There is a familiar humanity in her complexity, her dutiful attitude made complicated by her existential doubt. This quality in Imogen’s writing is something I wanted to preserve. The narrator attempts to articulate the parts of life that are mysterious with pressing honesty, a confrontation that she hopes brings her to a more legible certainty. There is no authoritative warning at the end of this story; searching for a lesson here is a destinationless act. What we are left with instead is a sensation, familiar but not clearly nameable. Like a shadow cast by an invisible object.