If I walk away from where I am engaged in tracking down the 4th dog, I can become suddenly frightened. It’s as if I have been buried in a book, the world has been going on without me and I’ll never catch up, nor will I be safe because I have not been on watch.

Or that I have been dreaming in a vaccum, and the world could not possibly fit me and my vision into its schedule. I’ll have to go it alone and I am utterly unprepared. This feeling is like the anxiety dream, only I have it when I ‘m awake. its like an indigo cloud passes over, and the only light I have is a candle and the wind is blowing.

When this happens, I think I cannt possibly go on with this. It will spell disaster. The disruption will be complete and long lasting. There will be no recovery from it.

It is fear. But I don’t understand from where it comes or what it’s cloud brims over with. It is anxiety about anxiety. That here, in my box seats high above the stadium, my table strewn with books, my microphone on to catch the bubbles of my joy, I am competent, brilliant even. I make connections, I find things out. I work at it all day. Hunting down pedigrees and health clearances. Looking things up. Writing letters. Writing to breeders laying out my dream like a box of silver before them. Asking them if they have the piece missing from my pattern.

I n the hours after the cloud passes over, silent, stealthy, I begin to feel like a fraud. Like a kid making prank calls, or a teenager writing to a movie star. My parents have not said yes. I am pretending I can have another dog, but it will end in disappointment.

How many years of my childhood were spent like this?! Bent over the story, eating the story, drinking the story until it became the very foundation of who I am. A girl who lives in an imaginary world where she no longer lives in an imaginary world.