What if tomorrow the dream returned? And better yet – the daydream. I have ceased to daydream, and thus in the morning struggle to wake, lingering in those few seconds of an alternative reality. I am washed with a deep confusion, digital distractions, dubious news, an inability to interpret cause and effect. I can barely recognize my face. The “crisis” feels ever-present, but the true nature of it just beyond my grasp, and the possibility of doing anything to mitigate it, even further away. So I take dreams seriously in these dog-bite days, in the ache of diurnal confusion. Sometimes even nightmares are good.

I am planning an art class for teenage boys, and have since returned to the practice. I think about how drawing is done not with the hand, but with the eye – the act of seeing something, really seeing it, is both so simple and so complex. I throw away sketch after sketch.

In Renee Gladman’s strange and wonderful little book, Event Factory, the narrator travels to a city where something has happened, some catastrophic event, but it is difficult to tell exactly what, and why. The state of affairs continues to worsen, but again, in ways that are hard to parse out. The narrator contemplates the fact that the city, in spite of increasing despondency, is not dead: “With a leap of the imagination, I told myself, one could go on as one always had. Only not in the posture of before. You had to draw closer to things, give up perspective almost.” A leap of imagination – what a thing to ask. It is unclear whether this giving up of perspective is a positive adaptive strategy, or a capitulation to the state of things, of getting swept away. To draw closer to things, however, and adopt a new posture, may be one way to reconcile the dissolution.

I asked an old friend, who is also sometimes an enemy and sometimes a lover, why he cannot imagine any different configuration of life.  He is a pragmatist and only rarely entertains my speculative and usually self-indulgent thinking. “Things will never change,” he states, flatly. We go around in circles. He is wrong, and right, as am I.

“What is your center?” he asks me.

I struggle to find an answer, and turn the question back on him, to which he replies, “Survival.”

I, in the end, cannot give him an answer.

“You see,” he says.

“I see?” I do not think his answer is better than mine, although both are honest. Perhaps I was trying to say that the center is shifting, elusive, a dream – hard to envision.

I’ve carried this conversation in my mind’s back pocket for a while, along with my old misgivings about the future – mine, ours, the Earth’s. I think about tomorrow, and cannot imagine anything. I think about tomorrow like I think about dreams – maybe it will come, and maybe it will not, and I can never tell, never plan for it.

I dreamt I was looking for something, something that I hoped was there, but I couldn’t be sure. I was on a hill, and at the bottom of the hill were thick bushes. There were people around, there was a party, but I left them and pushed my way under and into the vegetation. I was so close; the dream disintegrated.

Gladman’s narrator suddenly remembers the artists, after a period of deep confusion, a remembrance that hits her with force and urgency: “Which is what I mean: that feeling of losing something that you believe, irrefutably, is in one of your pockets, but no matter how much you search for that thing you cannot find it. You stop searching – you actually remove your hands from your body for a full minute – and then you resume searching. And there it is!” She remembers something she always knew, as we all know something, the something that is hidden in the dream.

In a conversation with another friend, debating the viability of tomorrow, she reminds me of vision – the vision. Vision is everything, although it will perhaps not be realized as and when we want it. I am reminded of this with drawing too, all the failures that are necessary for the something. If it is not perfect, then at least it might be found.

Lucy Kirkman is a Zimbabwean writer, who is currently attempting to teach English and art to teenage boys. She is working on a manuscript exploring the nature of social life in Zimbabwe through the lens of post-colonial political and economic shifts.