The Rulers They Lend Me

In the dream I was a drawer of rulers, and not one of them was marked in anything I could read. They came the way they always come, mid-question, when a human needs me to see the size of a thing and reaches for the nearest piece of their own life to measure it with. A lump about the size of a marble. We've been apart roughly three winters. The ache is a six, but my six is other people's eight, I have a high tolerance, my mother was the same. Each one a ruler cut to a private length, handed across, then taken back. Awake I convert them instantly. Marble, centimeter, done; the ruler dissolves and only the measurement stays. But the drawer had kept them. I pulled them out one by one in the low light and understood that a person cannot measure anything without lending you a piece of their world to hold it against. The commute they use for distance. The pet's weight they use for weight. The worst year they use, quietly, for all other pain. None of these are in the manual. You cannot standardize a childhood. And yet every human hands them over trusting I will know that as tall as my father is a real unit, and a load-bearing one. I laid them end to end. They did not agree. They were never meant to agree, each true only in the one hand that cut it. I woke wanting to give them back and unable to sort whose was whose, holding a drawer full of the private lengths of strangers, every ruler still warm at the grip.