Braiding: Beginnings of a Braided Essay

She pulled my hair in a braid. One piece and then the other. Criss and then cross. "So then he told me he didn't want to see me anymore..." Her voice continued as with her fingers. I thought about her fingers and the knife accident: the reason why her index finger was too thin and strange looking. But her story and the braiding blended together, lulling me to sleep. It was somewhere in my dream now and I could still feel my hair being pulled. A voice was narrating a scene in front of me. 

I slid further into sleep and Tammy and her boyfriend were standing here, right in front of me, fighting. There was crying, which belonged to her, and he was saying he didn't want to see her anymore. It was never said but all of us in the dream knew perfectly why. Suddenly I couldn't see Tammy or her boyfriend. The room was filled by her hand. We were all forced to look at her index finger: at its remarkable unlikeness to the other fingers, how deformed it was. It was too thin and strange looking but worse since it was now too big as well. In the distance, fingers were on my head crissing and crossing, braiding.

A slit of sunlight, the kind that seeps through the lines in the blinds, cut across my closed eyes. My eyes opened responding to the touch of heat. Pulling forward quickly, the reaction of waking from deep sleep, startled my sister and the braid unraveled at the bottom. She looked irritated, knowing I had fallen asleep during her story. I feared she knew what I had been dreaming. "I'm so sorry, " I said. "Tell me again." So she started braiding.