On a random, slightly unsettling yet related note: my dead friend Peter, my sometimes muse, had a very vivid dream a few days before he drove in his normal maniac style and wrecked (thank goodness he was the only one in the wreck; and thanks to nothing he managed to get himself killed.)

The dream?
He was sitting at the edge of a woods with His Perfect Other/Lover, and all the rocks smelled like peaches. He asked me what I thought it meant, and the dream kept teasing at the edges of my mind the way a word that’s failed to be recalled teases.

Two weeks after he died, I remembered: I’d gone to see an exhibit of Chinese art from various ages past a couple of months before. There was an exhibit card on one of the beautiful porcelain cups, a cup with exquisite brushwork peaches, and it read: The Peach is a Symbol of Eternal Life.

Damn. I still wish I could’ve told him what the peach smell meant.