*Our paying subscribers can now listen to full audio versions of some of Juke’s most-loved essays. Last month, we heard Damon Falke read A Summer Place, an essay from his ongoing collaboration with painter Tabby Ivy. This month, we’re listening to The Dreams of Divorcing Women, which was published in January. Free subscribers and everyone else can hit play for a short preview. Then check out the original piece, linked below, if you haven’t read it before… TM*
“It’s been a year since I left Kansas and I have been through phases of dreams. I made it through the initial months of paralysis and dread. Recurring bouts of spiders dropping down the walls. All through the spring, I stood immobilized in the past, incapable of speech and unable to escape.
Then, one night in May, help arrived. The neighbors who, in waking life, had helped me to leave Kansas—they began to appear in my dreams. They gathered my things with me, just like they had in reality a few months earlier. Another night, my mom showed up with a car to drive me away. I began to look around in my dreams for helpers, summoning them when I needed them.
By midsummer, my friend Sara was there with me. It was her turn to retrieve me from that house in Kansas. She stood in the living room, looking bored. “Tonya,” she asked me, “why are we still here?” She had a bag over her shoulder. “Can we leave now?”
By then, I was capable of speech. I had managed to drive away from that house, night after night, and I knew I could drive away again. Sometimes I didn’t have a car, so I walked away into the street. I was alone or else I was in the company of my friends. I was confused less frequently by the question of whether this was the present or the past.
I have left now at least a couple hundred times.”
Read the full piece here:
