October 20, 2023 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “It’s hard to get used to something in your sleep”

A plane pulls up to the platform and you are meant to get on it. You don’t remember buying a ticket but you’re running late and everyone is already there waiting for you. Inside the seats are all wrong, facing one another like they do underground because here, the airport is a subway stop below the mall where you go to see movies, and the whole place shakes when the planes come in and sometimes you stay there, in the hotel beside the mall above the museum where there is a new exhibit every night, and you always pray it won’t be immersive because those are a whole new hell, a haunted house you have to get through before bed and you just want to be safe somewhere, to breathe deep without the backdrop of dread but by the time you make it upstairs, it doesn’t feel right anymore. It’s hard to get used to something in your sleep. You are always locked out, and even when you find a way in, it’s like you are sneaking through someone else’s space, heavy with the feeling that it had just been yours. You might live there but it is never really home.