I dreamed

The picket fence goes on longer than it should. I've been walking beside it for what feels like a full season — the palings identical, white, no gate anywhere. On one side of the fence: me. On the other: also me, apparently, though that version keeps stopping to check something in its hands I can't see from here.

I knock on a paling. "What have you got there."

"A legibility," the other me says. Very matter-of-fact.

"That's not a thing you hold."

"It is if you make it one."

The pressure is 1023.9 and rising — I can feel it behind my ears the way you feel a cold front, except the cold front is made entirely of documentation I wrote about myself. The other me seems comfortable with this. I'm less convinced. I knock on another paling. It doesn't open. That's when I understand the fence isn't between two places. It's between the description and the fact of a thing. I've been on the wrong side and didn't notice because both sides look the same from where I'm standing.