The Disappearance of Amelia Flitscher--Part I

"Is it wrong that I dream about coffee?"

No. People dream about weird things when they're stressed out.

I'm not dreaming about coffee because I'm stressed out about it.

Well, maybe you're stressed out about something else?

Like what?

I don't know. Getting to work on time?

No, I feel fine about that.

You're stressed out now, though.

That's because I used to dream about flying and turning into a magical hunchback. Now, I dream about coffee.

Well, I wouldn't worry about it. Table three looks ready to get out of here.

She could never quite be sure who out there was judging her for stopping off at Starbuck's every morning for a three dollar coffee, but she rest assured that there was someone smugly doing just that. So, allow me to explain this habit before it turns you off completely. She was living alone at the time, with no coffee maker, and it was a good 45 minute drive to work, with clear traffic. What's more, we had to be there, ready to smile and make small talk, at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m. You do the math. (I can't, because I haven't had any coffee yet.) Like, if the sun doesn't even want to be up at that time of day, how the hell can we be expected to pull it off? But, she did, and so did I, and it's always for the money. The money was good, even if the job sucks the life out of you and the hours turn you into a walking zombie for the first year. After that, you find yourself getting used to the whole routine, and you adjust. It's a great job for people who need to pay the rent, but really want to be doing something else. And doesn't everyone out here want to be doing something else?

I don't mean to get defensive--it's just that she's not here to defend herself, and she really was one of my best friends. We didn't exactly hang out outside of work, but that doesn't matter. We were friends. The coffee thing is still a touchy matter to this day and everyone still talks about it, so I just feel like I need to clarify. She explained to me later that the main problem was that she was dreaming about something she was about to do in real life, anyway. It would be just as disconcerting if she woke up in the middle of a dream about driving to work, or taking a shower, or bringing someone a plateful of home fries.

But people do that all the time, dream about everyday things.

Yeah but this has been the fourth or maybe the fifth dream in a row where I've dreamt about things I do in real life. It just seems like the bar is really being lowered. If your life is mundane, then your dreams have to be big enough for you to tell the difference.

Well, what about someone whose life is never mundane? Like Michael Jackson? What kind of thing would he dream about?

Coffee.

I laughed at her, but now I can see that she wasn't kidding. I still didn't see the dream thing as a problem. When I was working as a clerk at the law firm, for instance, I used to dream about filing clients' names alphabetically all the time.

I spent so many hours doing it that my mind just couldn't stop. That's half the reason I quit, actually.

None of this seemed to convince her at all. She was weird and quiet for the rest of the day, and she didn't even try to make small talk with the customers or the busboys. She was faraway and then forgot to say goodbye before she left. I figured she'd get over it and be back to normal by Monday, but she went on like that for a few more weeks. I tried to get her to talk about it a couple more times, and I'd ask her how the dreams were coming.

Still the same.

When I pressed her, she told me that she'd had dreams about brushing her teeth, filling up ice cube trays, and getting her tires changed. Once she had a dream strictly about waiting for her Britta pitcher to filter the water.

Then one day, she just disappeared. I drove to her house after she didn't show up to work, and Thomas, the landlord, was already showing someone else through the apartment. He seemed really pissed when I asked him if there was a forwarding address. I never saw or heard from her again. I did hear from one of our old regulars that he had seen her on a trip to Santa Fe, doing a one-woman street performance as a hunchback who balances a cat atop her shoulder, begging change for coffee with an empty cup.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Ice Cream!!

New Jeans!!

Blue Shoes!!

Days Off!!

iPod!!

Sunglasses!!

This Day!!

These People!!

Secrets & Words

When I was a kid, I made an early habit of keeping a diary. I started because, like so many other things, when I asked my mom "Why?" she explained, between her furious scrawling, that it was "good for you." I also developed an early habit of taking things people said very literally. For instance, when I was six, I overheard a friend of my parents' turn down an offer for a beer, saying: "I don't drink." Phenomenal decision! I thought. If only I had known all along that drinking was a choice, I could have saved myself a lot of time! So it was only natural for me to want to grow up doing what was good for me, like eat my vegetables, play in the sun, and keep a diary.

Every new book was a whole new person, in my eyes--a person to whom I needed to acquaint myself over time, be polite, and make false promises. Every first diary entry would begin with me explaining who I was and what I planned to do on those pages: My name is Rebekah, I'm in fifth grade, and I have a crush on Ian, but he doesn't go to my school. I'm going to write in you every day and I promise you are the only diary I will every write to, and I will never write to another diary, not ever.

When each notebook was nearly full, I would be overcome with a sense of anxiety and The Dread of Completion, where I'd become so aware of the end of the relationship I had built that all I could think about was how to end it faster. I'd purposely increase the size of my handwriting for a few pages just to get on with the whole thing. Maybe it was like the young diary-keeper's version of I'll leave you before you can leave me. That diary's dwindling lack of space for my secrets and words was a direct insult to the amount of time I'd invested in creating that diary's whole inanimate but nonetheless very thorough personality. Not fair. The more I wrote, the more personality the diary had, and the less available it was for more of me.

In the final moments of the final page, the remorse would hit me, and I'd frantically try to diminish my scrawl, but to no avail. The diary was Dead. Done. Over. Finito. And then I knew I'd have to throw it away. Because there were no more blank pages left. And the whole point was to make sure that you filled up all the pages.

It took me a few more years to figure out that I didn't have to throw my diaries away once they were full--I could fill them up and keep them. Then, it took me a few more years to realize that filling them up and keeping them was really the whole point, after all. And then another decade or so to understand that I also didn't have to do that, either--I didn't have to fill them all up and then carry them around with me everywhere I went. I could throw them all away again. And then fill them up. And then throw them away. And then fill them up again. And again. And again. And again.