(Start from the beginning.)

That night I dreamed about the woman with the Dum-Dum again. We were sitting on two large rocks in the center of an impossibly vast field. The sky overhead was clear and the temperature perfect. We sat and talked and giggled like lifelong best friends. Her Dum-Dum this time was candy-apple green and I realized as we sat and talked that it never got past its midway nubby stage. I think she could've sucked on that thing forever and it wouldn't have dissolved an inch more.

She was telling me a story about bees.

"They weren't meant to fly, you know," she was telling me, taking a long suck on her Dum-Dum. I noticed today that she was very pretty, with large brown eyes and a little snub nose. She looked as if she was close to my age, if not exactly the same as me. She had long honey-brown hair that was straight as an arrow, but lusciously thick. Her full lips were painted a bubble-gum pink and her cheeks were dusted with light freckles. Before I only remembered her head, but today she was wearing a pink shirt that matched her lips underneath a pair of denim bib overalls. Her feet were bare.

"Who? Bees?" I asked, wondering if she had an extra Dum-Dum in one of her overall's many pockets.

"Yes, bees. When they were created, the wings were really only for ornamentation. They weren't strong or big enough to support the weight of the bees' bodies. But no one told the bees that. They saw the other insects flying, so they just did it, too."

She suddenly dug in her pocket and pulled out a watermelon Dum-Dum and handed it to me. It was as if she'd read my mind. I took it and began to unwrap it.

"That doesn't make sense," I said, popping the small sucker into my mouth. "If they weren't made to, then they wouldn't have been able to."

She smiled at me. "But they thought they could."

I shook my head. "That doesn't matter. I might think I can sing - it certainly doesn't mean that I can, even if I want to. Trust me!" I belted out a quick line from "Amazing Grace" and we were both laughing by time I stopped croaking.

"But bees do fly," she pointed out, stifling another round of laughter.

I thought about that. "They do. But it doesn't make sense that just your belief in something not real could make it reality."

"It makes about as much sense as not believing in something real and making it reality."

I woke up still tasting the watermelon Dum-Dum on my tongue.

Two Weeks Later
Adam hadn't spoken to me, and he hadn't returned to our bed; instead taking up a permanent residence on the living room couch. Tyler had started coming home in the evenings again, but he was very down about something. He moped around the house and wouldn't talk to me or his father, from what I could see. I cooked him breakfast every morning, but he never ate it. I knew he must be eating at school because he didn't appear to be losing weight. I was troubled, wondering what could have happened to make him so depressed. I hated that he didn't feel he could talk to me about it. I wished he would talk to me period.

I had been feeling pretty strange myself lately. I was normally a very direct person. If I wanted to know what was going on, I didn't stop until I had figured it out and pestered everyone until they spilled what they knew. But as of late I'd been so very lax about the events taking place in my house. I wasn't demanding Adam to talk to me anymore, but started ignoring him, too. I accepted Tyler's depression and silence whereas before I would've been stark raving mad trying to fix my son and shower him with love and find out what was hurting him. I still couldn’t make myself get into my car, and I had just accepted this rather than try to figure out why or fight myself until the deed was done. Was this what happened after you hit your 30's? Did you just begin to accept life's little nuances and aggravations rather than fight to change them? Did you just shuffle along and not care enough to make things right?

I dreamed about the Dum-Dum woman three more times and we always talked like old friends and about the strangest things. I could swear that I felt her around me during the day when I was awake, and a few times was sure I'd seen her out of the corner of my eye. I knew this was impossible, but I couldn't shake the feeling that she was with me at all times.