Michelle Darling: Pearls, Cheerios, Dreams
we oil our hands and then we covered them in dirt and now it smells like sheep and garlic
Matilda Love: Do you guys remember your dreams last night? I had this dream where my friend Maeve called me and said she was right outside my door and that we had to go. I really thought I had to go so I freaked out enough to wake myself up. So I checked my phone and it turned out I was dreaming and nobody had called me.
Michelle Darling: Um, I don't remember mine from last night, but I remember the one from the night before. Oh yes. Where I had been on some like steep cliffside. And Quinn was trying to down hold the camera, right? And every time the camera would zoom in it would get like foggy outside so I was having a really hard time recording him but then he was like, oh okay. Well let's go to the grocery store and we went to the grocery store, he became my sister.
And that was like, normal. He was just this girl. Um, And at the store I was shopping for cheese and they sold all of their cheese, not all of them but the ones that were available. It's like you know how like near the checkout stations there's like the to-go that's like full of like mints and candy.
Yeah it's literally just tiny open refrigerators of like one ounce samples of two cheese. that's left over from cuts. By the ounce. And I was trying to think a very particular kind of cheese that like, I needed for some event and just this weird grocery store because there was like eighteen different cashiers and they were all like teenagers.
And there were all like, really confused when I was trying to talk about it. And then after I went home from the supermarket, my stepfather came into my room, and he was in his robe that he wears, when he's like sleeps, it's like this gray towel poof, And he had just woken up from a nap.
He told me that, he's so tired. And i'm like, why are you so tired? Like all the time? And he said I you know, I hate to like admit it but like I have I have to just consider that I have skin cancer and I was like really? He was like yeah i'm just so tired all the time and no matter what I do like I just feel tired and I was looking at him and I said what would be hard to figure out if you do because you have freckles everywhere. So, we couldn't really be able to find it, even if you did. There's that. I don't know what that means.
Yeah. And the night before I had it even stranger dream where these two teenage boys were going to try to wreck and steal my car. And I was hiding in the parking garage across from my car. They saw me and so in order to pretend that it wasn't my car I transformed into like a traditional old russian woman and I had a scarf on and like the red rose garb and I kept saying “i'm sorry, i'm sorry, i'm sorry”. I was in full like russianware.
The whole thing is that like in my mind I knew I transformed into a old russian woman, I guess. They wrecked my car but then they started wrecking the car next to it and I was like,
“no, you guys aren't doing it right”
So I was like, okay, well, screw this and I decided to crawl into my car because through a bunch of broken glass from my windshield and started trying to run them over. I was like you punks, you guys ruined everything. Like I don't remember what you were supposed to do and you're not even doing it right. So i'm just going to get rid of you. So they hopped back in the car that they came from and I chased them down the hallway, through like this, winding coastal small town and I ran them off a cliff. I ran their car off a cliff into the ocean and they died.
Then I started running away to hide and I found this old construction site and I hid in one of these wooden rooms and I could hear my mom whaling and crying and screaming. She was crying over her lost children, who just died. So like I guess I killed my brothers.
Matilda Love: And you were in the form of a mother, the russian woman?
Michelle Darling: No, I wasn't pretending anymore to be old
Ronin Reeves: Did your mom know that you had killed them?
Michelle Darling: I don't know. But I was hiding because I didn't want her to find me or anyone who was looking for me. But I didn't know that they were her kids.
And also, there was some frozen pond that I walked over that started breaking when I walked over. But there was like a whole 30 people, a whole village of people, out on it and we were all on the lake. For whatever reason. And it started shattering and falling in.
Ronin Reeves: Last night, I didn't dream. But, I think my roommate was having a strange dream. I can't tell if I was the one dreaming and I dreamed this up or if she was the one that was dreaming and this actually happened. Because, I got back into my room at like 3:30-4:00ish. My roommate was asleep and I walked in and she immediately rose up and kind of looked at me. Like, half asleep, half awake. And I couldn't tell if she was talking to me or talking to her herself.
And she was just like “i'm just really tired. I'm just really tired.”
I was like “okay, do you need anything? Like, do you need any help?”
She was like “I'm just tired. I'm just tired.”
And I was like “okay, well if you have to talk like you're free to, like, I'll listen to you if you need.”
She was like “no, i'm tired, i'm tired, i'm tired.”
It's like the only thing she could say. So then I went about my night, I made myself a bowl of cereal, which I ate in bed. And then I was watching something, having those cheerios, which I actually had with a lactose-free milk.
Michelle Darling: Yeah. Lactated, are you lactose-free?
Ronin Reeves: I'm actually not. I don't know why I ordered lactose free. Yeah,
Matilda Love: Grubhub?
Ronin Reeves: Yeah, I actually grubhugged Lactose free milk and honey nut cheerios and the man from GrubHub texted me, I don't know how he found my number, and he sent me a photo of Honey Nut Cheerios and I said “okay, cool, Honey nut cheerios”
and he said “Ronin.”
He just said my name.
Michelle Darling: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ronin Reeves: I was scared that he was gonna like find me and stalk me. So I deleted his number but he got me the cheerios and I was eating those in my room last night.
And then I think I was asleep, but I woke up, maybe, this is where it gets a little confusing. I don't know if this was the dream or if she was dreaming, but I woke up and she was just standing next to my bed, kind of looking at me. And it reminded me of when you're really little and you feel sick to your stomach and you wait outside your parents room. it didn't feel like she was watching me, but more of like she wanted something from me, like she was wanting help or something.
Michelle Darling: Oh, and you were trying to help her earlier
Ronin Reeves: It was just very confusing and I woke up and I was like, I genuinely can't tell if this was a dream or if this like actually happened. And i'm still on the fence.
Matilda Love: Scary.
Ronin Reeves: Yeah, she's a little woozy she's been a little freaked recently.
Michelle Darling: Why is she freaked?
Ronin Reeves: There's just some family stuff going on with her but I'm hoping I can talk to her today. Hoping she can talk also, I want her to share.
Matilda Love: This is beautiful what we've got here
Ronin Reeves: But then it reminded me of this time when I was like, eight years old and I used to sleepwalk a lot and I peed in a trash can while sleepwalking. I thought I was going to the bathroom but I was going to the kitchen and my dad found me with my pants off over the trash can in our kitchen like peeing in it.
And that's like the one memorable sleepwalking occasion that I have.
Matilda Love: For like two weeks this summer I really really thought that I was sleeping and that I was dreaming.
Michelle Darling: Oh, why? Why were you delirious?
Matilda Love: I was so certain that there was like another dimension above me. I though I was just asleep and the waking world was above me. I was braiding garlic then too.
Ronin Reeves: What was the verdict? What was going on?
Matilda Love: I don't know, it just stopped.
Michelle Darling: This is all a dream because sometimes when you tweak out, even though it is A delusion and something that's not reality, It is very real. it's definitely worth thinking about.
Surprise Snow
Michelle Darling
Surprise Snow Sound is a binding of spells, a charm dangling by the hair. Noise: anything that can be heard, taken from the outside in. In order to ‘hear’ in good faith, there is no passive moment spent listening. We tend to share everything in our smallest details. Like that of the lapping constant of the sea, or the chittering air of summer, and how each gust of wind is responded to by your squinting eyelids. Like all these matters, the significance of sound waves crashing and pulling, its wayward murmur, can only be received if listened to…
Where on the route home, just to be smitten by the rain, pausing and still unlike the street, where each segment and crosssection bends the stream, a sonate forming on the lips of the street, if you stopped to see, if you parted that poor berated coat that hangs limp from your head, to hear better, notice how in the brief meeting with an overpass, silence can swiftly fold into a drumming pea patter of the rain. And the person shrieking up the street at a friend's parting path. The falsehoods we fancy in a dream is best shared by telling them as if they are our own, where our subconscious has asked us to pick up the phone and up to the ear. On the line, there is only low hummed bubbling and barking and the television broadcasts the news, passing the wisdom baton of snow to come. There is divine in the daily. Our night rituals make an earnest lot of us, caught off guard by our own whimsy, or yet, terrific flurries of fear…surprise snow, surprise snow, you are in love, your teeth are chipping and flaking, you are peeling garlic on the floor into segments, faithfully, at 3pm, there is a bus to catch but she is 6 minutes late or maybe she never shows up at all, there is far too many finches inside that bush, none can be seen, but swallows up the air with their chirping, surprise snow. Dream logic makes sure of sweet deaths for they are fun to tell. As one wakes, the dream may never subside; may you walk beguiled, charmed, moonstruck by all the smallest of things that come to be.
All I can ever hope for,
Something to pause
In the name of.
Surprise Snow,
On the way home.
Even September,
Planting garlic bulbs,
Surprise Snow.
With love,
Darling
An oyster that's not been wounded cannot produce pearls because pearls are a wound that has been healed.
There's an old technique in ancient Greece and other places when pearls were extremely popular. The sales people would sell them and they would be like crystal shops that tell you certain crystals have certain properties. Same thing with the colors and the shapes of pearls. They would relate them to the quality of the dew that impregnated the oyster. The weather that day, the season, the region, and like the the Good Faith of the dew that was inside of them.
And also all those renaissance portraits of the mfa of this little 12 year old girls completely covered in pearls and ruffles. You guys think how cute but theyre actually one of like six portraits that they would send out to the suitors.
And they would paint these portraits covered in massive pearls. The more pearls and the bigger, they are, the more it meant “Look, she may not be ready right now, but when she's of age, she's fertile, like she will bear your children ,and it was a sign of the family being like, yeah.
She's got game. Oh, get this girl on the market. She will bear your children. She's flourishing”
The symbol of Fertility.
super super thanks to the darling herself, Michelle!
...that poor berated coat that hangs limp from your head...💚
MemeShell