In college, I had a friend who, whenever he found a key on the ground, would pick it up and say, “I’m going to hold on to this. You never know when you might be stopped by a locked door; this might open it.” It always made me laugh because the odds of meeting a locked door, the key to which I picked up several years ago and carried with me ever since, are simply absurd. But, perhaps because of my own penchant for the absurd, I adopted his habit.
The other day, I woke up from a dream repeating the word “iputipus.” If Muriel Rukeyser is right, and the universe really is composed of stories rather than atoms, then maybe words are the keys to the locked doors we may be stopped by in the future. Just in case, I’m holding on to “iputipus.” I picked it up in a dream, and brought it with me into the waking world. It sounds like it may unlock an interesting door.
