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The first witnessing is only of bodies falling, quite abstracted, orange shadows passing across the field of vision, against a concrete backdrop punctuated with small opaque windows that reveal nothing.

In New York City I pace about, every now and again descending into the subway (like those photographs I rediscovered in my memory), riding trains. I have redesigned my hairstyle – my fringe is dyed platinum blond and from the crown to the tips is hot pink, saturation increasing as it reaches the tips. I <3 my hairstyle; I feel renewed and reawakened from a decade of cultural obscurity and decreasing circles of criticality that have effaced my potential. I am sitting on a train, anxiously, on my way to a ‘meeting’ with my father. I am not drugged. I project that he suspects me drugged, for which he blames my lover. I project this in the dream and it floods me with more anxiety. I am sweating profusely. I hold a pocket mirror to my face and glance at my reflection. I reflect [on] my appearance. My appearance is too much; my hairstyle is ridiculous. Something that ought to be youthful and sleek is actually a depressing masquerade which harks back to a time before even my own [youth]. I look like an amalgam of Rod Steward and Suzi Quatro: like a Jem doll from the 1980s who is trapped in the signifiers of 1970s rock, in spite of a sort of futuristic pinkness.

It is now that I begin to nestle into my ridiculousness and begin to ripen there, and as I do my defences drop, the fury that resides in me seeps out into the follicles and I feel emblazoned. Also I realise that I need my daughter with me, and call my own mother with whom she is staying whilst I attempt this (nonetheless abortive) encounter with my father, who gives me nothing and takes everything: who empties me. I dial the number incorrectly over and over again, my palms are sweating and my body is convulsing. I manage to speak to someone [male] who reports that he, my mother and my daughter are driving away from where I am, out of the city, for the afternoon. It is too much to take [that my daughter is diverging from where I am], so I return to the subway, only to find that my train has departed. I watch it snake out of the station, aghast, horrified and paralysed.

Somehow, simultaneously, when I am calling/speaking to my mother/her male companion (and not getting through) I am also engaged in the articulation of a tirade against my father (face to face). This messy entanglement causes my speech to become corrupted and the trajectories of these confrontations (with self and other) to be mutually engulfing. I have no verbal flow, only bile, which flows but is also produced out of retching. My face is contorted and my tears have abandoned their taut, salty pathways on my cheeks.

Return to the falling bodies. This time, excruciatingly, I accompany them in their descent (scopically: I am a disembodied witness). The expressions on the faces of these falling bodies, clad in orange jumpsuits in the manner of U.S. prisoners, are already fixed grimaces etching greyish flesh. As the ground closes in my view detaches by degrees. By the time they make contact with the sidewalk [this in New York City] paving slabs, this witness watches from a distance of 15 feet: close enough to discern the crumpled (bloodless) corpses atop one another in a lifeless pile of grey over grey. The ground is icy and the bodies too turn to ice: the misery of their lifetime of incarceration enshrined in their grimaces that frame gritted teeth. My stomach turns.