(no subject)
To hazard a guess
Lucidity is the curse of a mind made mindless. One which both bestows and betrays an illusion of continuity.
In my troubled past few months I -as often happens during periods of emotional distress- have had a long series of mostly lucid dreaming. I’ve gotten used to them over the years. At times terrifying but generally introspective and freeing. This last spate have been almost mocking. They take place on one street, and yet stretch for miles of meaning.
Drifting off, staring at a laptop screen, I’m jostled by a girl with a name that is merely the slow rise of a clarinet. Some soft note I haven’t the musical skill to identify. Lithe and effervescent, hair like a tied sprig of mussed corn silk. We’re in some cramped dorm room half occupied by couch and bed. She’s a friend, I sense. We’re working together on something. She’s asking for help. Giggling, bashful. I’m not supposed to be assisting her, it seems. But I’m offering to. Still trying to catch my thoughts from the scattered field of my apparent implied action. The beginning drop into a dream has this familiar murkiness that lures you in.
Spreadsheet work. Simple enough. I can certainly guide through that as we sidle up to one another in a tender but still friendly way. A television is oozing blinding and bright from the opposite corner of the room and I find myself interested in the pale slate hue of her eyes as I start to feel a boredom with the surroundings. A chart or two down I notice the numbers are jumbling. Every time I read them they reorder. Lengthen, shorten, occasionally denature.
My occipital lobe is blunted…my ability to read being compromised. I realize I’m dreaming. Those parts of my mind are deadened or distracted. At least my body is resting.
With that I care little for the task. I splay out across the bed and snake an arm around her. Why not? Easy to have extra flirtatious confidence outside of reality. She laughs, rolls to one side then another. We edge close and press temples together to keep from a kiss. Careful and fearful like fumbling teenagers. I back off but enjoy her smile and return a teasing mirrored curve.
“We’re supposed to work together,” she posits, as her nose pokes against my cheekbone. Narrow, pointed. An exotic beak, it pushes me back slightly.
Another friend enters from a door that likely didn’t exist in this realm seconds ago. Tall and genial. Mocking us with a grin. My companion’s soft skin pulls away from mine bashfully and I sit upright, assuming the dream will shatter soon enough. At least I tried.
“You know she doesn’t want anything to do with you that way,” the intruding friend chuckles. I laugh too. Of course she doesn’t; my mind constructed her as an archetype of some desirable but unobtainable compelling force that is using me for unrewarding task work with a goal never to be made whole. She’s my career mixed with my desire to be wanted. I’m not exactly new to this game. I recognize the carrot, ma’am.
I half roll over to the couch, coiling against one of the armrests at the far side of this cramped little space, looking to take up some joking conversation or just wait to snap awake. “No idea where that notion came from,” I respond. Some pretty funny conversations have come from my odd lucid dreaming; let’s see what this fragment of my being has to offer.
But rather than a retort she offers a curious glance to my side, still smirking. I follow her gaze and there is my attempted partner, my apparition, at the end of my shoulder, smiling and leaning in. That tiny point of her nose grazes the side of my own as we meet for a kiss. It is hard, like awaking to find your jaw clenched, and I feel the teeth beneath. Though atop that pressure is the slightest softness of thin, inviting lips. The aura around us is sweet and comforting. Fresh laundry, a mothballed pillow, the misty air after a long shower. I was surprised. Shocked. Shocked awake.
I return to what I’ve accepted as reality and within that expanse I carry this cheery memory of the smiling blond girl with the pale eyes that might actually enjoy looking back into my own. I think little more of it. I carry about my waking life.
The next sleep finds me far elsewhere. The troubles in my head have compounded and the instincts of flight and fleet have brought me to a terminal. Both position and path. I think I’m past the security checkpoint but in this bustling place, rearranging in real time, I can’t say for certain. I wander by a baggage carousel and fumble through a long line of my possessions. Mostly. Some are odd color and pattern variations of items strewn about my living world. Put on a conveyer for all to see. For only me to recognize their true hue, their true purpose, the true memory woven within them. That which I hid away.
I grab a bag that has what I consider to be the optimal level of all my worldly presence and head up the stairs to await my next trip.
Frustratingly; waiting is all I can do. These bustling hallways present nothing to me but the glowing crawl of neon signs and the notably blank faces of a purgatorial pass-through. A chyron. A chrysalis.
I pull the weight of my worth on its wearing wheels and slump off to a side waiting area. Large plush beds. Some boutique version of the usual rows of ergonomically erratic one-row bleachers. Expansive and inviting. Sharable. I pick one with the fewest other travelers upon it and lay down my burdens at the 11 o’clock spot of a faded pink plush oval which could easily fit a dozen other weary wayfarers.
Not far from me a warm figure edges near. Glancing back once or twice, making her grey eyes ever so barely caught. Making her backward advance appear accidental as she occasionally nudges against me and tosses quick apologies over her shoulder. I welcome the touch. The simple presence of contact and a sharing of warmth. It’s seemed a long time to feel honest want. In fleet, maybe this miniscule piece of life is really all I was trying to find. For the first time in this trek I feel…connected…however oddly…to someone who isn’t a dream. She…she isn’t actually…oh…
I lace an arm along her hip. Not unlike my experience with the earthy-haired girl from the other night. And she curls into me. A subtle cyclone, pulling me closer into something odd. Anonymous yet tender. Pleasant yet somehow dark. There’s a hollow distance between our touching skin. Something isn’t right.
She turns and kisses me as if this is what these little stations were designed for. Perhaps they are and I simply can’t identify them as such. Perhaps they are and…I created them for such.
I’m dreaming. I’m asleep. Whatever hints I had before should have jolted me to realize it but her face makes it inescapable. Her kiss has the lightest layer of softness, but beneath is a stone row of teeth and birdlike hollow bone and every bit of affection as the simple scrape of a gravestone. Her skin is paler than even my own and her eyes show a swallowing depth; the only iris like the reflecting moonlight of an evening pond.
She’s Death. Calling me forth to run away. To escape. To fall in with the simple serenity of her touch and leave this life behind. To accept this slice of connection and ride it away from everything I once knew. I pull back from her skeletal salaciousness; every bit as on-display as my own beneath my withering skin, and I abandon my collections, abandon my comfortable perch; I leap back and over the edge of this pit and rush to the conscious world.
My mind is aching. For what it lacks in clarity it is not lacking in the jarring nature of the messages it sends. These attempts at escape, these cringing, fearful moments. The physical, painful, searing touch of neuron to neuron in what I just wish would be a peaceful place. There is a specter within it all. A grim portent.
Anxiety is a bizarre malady. One which puts a person in all spots at all times. I am at the very bad kiss I gave to my prom date right now. I'm laying against the wall of a Spokane hospital, about to be sent out of the room so my then-girlfriend could chat with her true crush. I'm laying on a lawn in Virginia being told to go away by one of the other apartment residents. I’m getting an award in the gymnasium of my high school in a field for which I always wanted to be valued, and seeing my parents in the bleachers, secretly invited. I'm chest deep in the Gulf of Mexico thinking the sea was only seconds from crushing me. I'm in Forrest County Hospital, being born at 3 in the morning. I'm at my very unfortunate death, I just don't know it yet. Or my idea of time progression blocks me from recognizing it.
I used to stay up late worrying about what would happen if I lived forever. I didn't want to die but I didn't want anything to end I didn't want anything to "never" end. I didn't want my parents or my hamster to die, but I didn't want to be stuck wanking around a "heaven" for all time. I wonder if all things are writ. One story happening simultaneously. We are in these acts at all times. Religious people talk about a god creating existence and scientists discuss the big bang but there's no conception for what precedes a beginning. Unless we are ill equipped to ever postulate something before that I wonder if we are all in the same moment at all times and it was so much that we reflexively made the experience linear. And that anxiety is just something shy of realizing it. Becoming unhinged. Living it all at once for a rapid, scarring, fleeting flashes.
I suppose the bright part of it is that while I'm in those moments I'm also shivering at a table outside an ice cream shop in Pullman being treated to a dollar scoop from a girl I’d come to love because it was a Tuesday. And I'm on top of Rainier overlooking the Nisqually glacier and seizing up, falling to a kneel because heights mess with me even though the view was beautiful beyond wording. I'm driving south from Spokane and reaching the point of the highway where the trees fade off and the chalky orange cliffsides ebb and the sky seems so enormous that it feels as if it could tangibly crush you. I'm in my parents' kitchen eating spaghetti and drinking wine on one of my first trips back from school.
I attempt to keep my mind in these nicer places as I hope for kinder sleep.
I come to, only to find myself waiting. A soft chair. Though the armrest digs into my ribs a bit. I’ve been shedding weight, I need to be careful about that.
A lobby of some sort. Old. A place that was made for economy rather than purpose. That’s ok. I’m not certain why I’m here, so maybe that’s fine. It feels fine. I look to the thin carpet scraping my shoe. An odd pattern that recalls a smattering of red onion slices. Those weird purple arcs. What a strange choice.
A voice apologized for my wait and I answer with my usual soft tone saying there’s no worry at all. There isn’t. Why would there be? I’m dreaming. This is a mental reconstruction of a building I used to have to traffic back in college. My head pulled a very strange detail to map its floor.
I pass through the muted tunneling hallways of this aged administrative building. One of the crumbling south-campus sections of peeled laminate and fake wood styling. Like the space-age promise of a basement rec room. Clouded window barriers and a thin shelf off to the side of…
She catches my arm and greets me slyly. It’s the same girl from the dream…weeks ago. The one I thought I’d not see again. Thatched blond hair and shy eyes. Those lips I kissed once. Suddenly I’m losing my lucidity and being around her has a level of intoxication. That presence, that simple desire. That possibility of being wanted…it’s there again.
She begs me wait a few more minutes before we reconnect. That must have been why I’m here…I’m here to meet her…here to take her to… Reality clouds further. She squeezes my hand and does the oddest little nuzzle of her cheek against my own. Entranced, I take a seat. Another waiting area. Not dissimilar from my starting point. Though this one still has that shelf I was looking at. I remember it held some attraction to it. Something that caught my eye.
Upon the shelf rests two small plastic bins. Thin spokes in the sides suggest an elementary school collection of markers and pencils but inside are miniaturized versions of that which occupies my real-life home. Furniture and appliances and clothes and…familiar pictures on the wall.
I hear a strange rattle at the back of my ear. I move closer to the arrangement. My possessions of the past near-decade writ small. Modeled. Like a dollhouse grab bag of that which surrounded me day to day. That noise keeps disrupting my attention though. A clattering. A ruckus. The patter of…
Rain. It’s raining in the real world. Which this is not. My living body can hear water upon the window. I’m dreaming. I’m asleep.
It morphs into a rapping at the wall. Subtle but unavoidable. Drawing my attention but I still can’t help but be drawn to these odd little trinkets. Abandoned and collected into a little plastic bin. Sat on a shelf to be cataloged or parceled out. My macro life made micro. The static outside grows louder. A rainstorm thrumming against these thin office walls.
She returns from her quick task and grasps my arm with an enthusiasm she seemed too shy to share in this sort of public place. A tenderness, an excitement she’d previously withheld. Calling me forth. Drawing me deeper into the depths of this structure. This comfortable, simple, organized, manageable structure. Led by someone seemingly shyly accepting of me, perhaps even oddly caring for me. I forget the sound of the storm for a moment.
The collection of my tiny homestead behind me flushes the haze out a bit. I just want to follow her joy. Which leads to a little repetitive, recursive waiting area deeper inside. A couple plush chairs aligned almost perfectly for us to just escape a while and await whatever task must be on the horizon. We sit, we curl against one another, we trade the softest of kisses. Tracing a trembling track down each neck. And I’m overjoyed at this affection towards me I didn’t think exis…
Our lips meet again and it’s that same light warm plushness overlaying stone given movement. Her teeth. I feel those teeth as much as the candied lips atop them. Similar to the fumbling confusion in the dorm room. And similar to the chilling forcefulness of the terminal.
The realization comes stark and harsh. My vision was blurred. My need to be appreciated clouded any intelligent realization I could have had. Arrogance. Negligence.
She is Death as well. Drawn in a different manner. Targeting a different part of me. Needling through a vulnerability all too easily exploited. Playing a longer game. Pleasant to the level of perfection yet no less fatal. Honestly much more dangerous. Because I was entranced, caught up in the idea of her and the slight spark in the slip of her skin running along mine, calmly, sweetly calling me to follow her into those depths. Dangerous because I was saddened to realize she is merely a shade of my subconscious and not some source of true affection. I wished she wasn’t a dream. The worst type from which to awake.
I looked into sheer and shattered metal reflections at different times over the past years and saw in them what I felt was a ghost of something. The Ghost of Olympia. The Ghost of Jefferson Street. The Ghost of the Palouse. The Ghost of a life left to languish. In starry-eyed time; the Ghost of some larger sect of life. Always the sheen and solitary shade of me wandering through the quiet night, A brother only to starlight. A citizen of the time between night and morning, Archivist of the few ashen hours of the day's reincarnation. The pale blue world that seems to stretch forever when your mind won't shut off. Azure is my favorite color and it's usually used to describe a clear blue sunny sky. This is the other azure. The blue that cracks not through the sky but the surrounding glow of a world set still. One of a day tentatively waiting for its predecessor to pass. A night pursuing rest. The slow pensive end of a chapter marked by its willful withholding from the stars and its defiant stance against the sun.
I keep taking on the visage of a ghost of our time. A wayfarer despite location, in some way. I was reading recently about a psychological malady labeled Cotard’s Syndrome, in which a person believes wholly that they are dead. Carrying along aimlessly. I found it a fascinating concept. An inverse of what I’ve felt these past years. I don’t know what the equivalent is for someone who believes they are bizarrely, illogically alive. Traversing a world that seems incapable of expelling my presence. Incapable of rest. Inexplicably awaking. Called back for something I cannot wistfully pinpoint.
I end another vigil, meeting the chirping presence of a slowly waking dawn, and block it out with drapes and eyelids.
I exit the station in which my desirous death works and attempted to hold me in place. The odd old recollection and cobbling of bizarre buildings of a more youthful time. It leads out to a crosswalk. With that stale building to my back I see to my left a familiar road. One that grew with me through childhood, adulthood, realization and escape. At its much-too-terminal end is the airport. Within it all the same dire remnants passing along the carousel and the grim, inviting mistress a floor above. I’m still in a daze, so while ominous, it stirs no fear in me. I can’t remember why I’ve come to this street. To the right: the road stretches much further. I see no end to it. Along its side, lining the intersection is some sort of bazaar or market. A smattering of little booths peddling their wares and swarmed by cheerful people looping between their rows of grins and gifts.
I’m not supposed to go there though, I sense.
I have an assignment. I find some folded instruction in my pocket. The handwriting atrocious and difficult to decipher. Though my handwriting is usually similarly atrocious, so I don’t begrudge the note.
To my back is the stale building, to my left the path to the terminal. To my right the vast road lined by the bazaar. But ahead of me is a long messy stairwell to a brick building I’m apparently directed towards. This side of the road is old. Far older than anything else near. The same mist that obscures the path to each side smears the vision of what must be present atop. I ascend. The stairs are wide and overbuilt. Not maintained in far too long. Collapsing in many places. Made of unassuming red brick, they begin to resemble a salmon run more than a hallowed path the further one follows. Whole steps wavering into pools of green water flowing from far above. Basically an entire entryway made of three-foot koi ponds lost to disrepair.
I reach the top. Inside is a simple library. Seemingly undeserving of such a stairwell. It wasn’t difficult to get to; not some grand trek, just illogical. Eliciting more pity than awe. The literary collection seemed uninteresting. Towards a corner was our assembly point; myself and a dozen other with the same marching orders. Sent to take some sort of bizarre test challenging our writing production.
I had to wait through several bizarre “trials” while mine came to a difference between meanings on a word that didn’t exist. Some word that, when put up on the projector for judgment, fluctuated with every look. Moving meaning. Altering application.
I suppose I’d be proud of such a quantum word. I wish I could bring it back to the living world. I wish…I wish. But sadly it didn’t exist. Because, I now see, I was dreaming and that part of my brain was in flux. Why? Why am I being delivered to this again and again?
I became more flippant than I generally am in reality and waited out this ongoing group trial until I could leave or awake. Over time I started to leave lucidity again. The dream seemed real enough as I tried to rest. This soft release, goofy as it may be, still felt hazily comforting. As I walked away from the strange court a group of the people observing; friends, by my sensing, stayed to ask how we’d all move forward. One in particular was a girl, of course. Tall, walnut-haired, piercing amber eyes. Wearing a scarf so white it was blinding bright. Like Pennsylvania snow. Like the teeth of the first dream of death. Like the slow light that brings me out of these jaunts through my psyche. But boots reflecting the muck we all had to traverse to reach this strange court. We must have known each other a while. Her soft smile peeled back and she said she was glad we were all fine. It was absurdly friendly and comforting. So much so…
A dream. Dammit.
So I ask if she wants to grab supper. This dream has gone on for quite a while, I realize. It must be ending soon.
She acts enthusiastic and agrees. Trying to arrange a time.
Idiocy. Infantile bullshit and paper dolls. My mind has constructed thin veils this time around. Totems with no nuance. I thought myself more creative than this. She is Death. Accepting me, drawing me out, sharing my ills. Casual Death. Comfortable Death. Hidden behind my imagined value.
I name some distant hour and make my way back down the swamp of stairs. Kicking past the settled algae and dim depths of ruined steps.
I emerge. Technically asleep. Oddly awake. At the base of these aging stairs I meet the road yet again. The fog thin enough to glimpse the old stone building, straight ahead of me. Somewhere inside presumably that girl with the thin lips and shy affections. To my right; the grandiose pathway out of everything with the horrid drowned concierge of a dark release. Behind me; what I can only assume is some form of me judging my own worth and rewarding myself with some gift that blinds me to that trap of staring into the galaxy of words and hoping to pluck out the perfect stars.
To my left is one more clouded street. Along it runs a sprawling grid of simple stands and humble, laughing, faceless presences. Enjoying whatever morning to which I must be awaking. Color and sound, however faint, fills the neighborhood. Presumably I’m supposed to look there too. I wonder what awaits?
I laugh. I laugh in my dream. I laugh in my wonder.
What will I find there?
To hazard a guess: a girl named Death.
Lucidity is the curse of a mind made mindless. One which both bestows and betrays an illusion of continuity.
In my troubled past few months I -as often happens during periods of emotional distress- have had a long series of mostly lucid dreaming. I’ve gotten used to them over the years. At times terrifying but generally introspective and freeing. This last spate have been almost mocking. They take place on one street, and yet stretch for miles of meaning.
Drifting off, staring at a laptop screen, I’m jostled by a girl with a name that is merely the slow rise of a clarinet. Some soft note I haven’t the musical skill to identify. Lithe and effervescent, hair like a tied sprig of mussed corn silk. We’re in some cramped dorm room half occupied by couch and bed. She’s a friend, I sense. We’re working together on something. She’s asking for help. Giggling, bashful. I’m not supposed to be assisting her, it seems. But I’m offering to. Still trying to catch my thoughts from the scattered field of my apparent implied action. The beginning drop into a dream has this familiar murkiness that lures you in.
Spreadsheet work. Simple enough. I can certainly guide through that as we sidle up to one another in a tender but still friendly way. A television is oozing blinding and bright from the opposite corner of the room and I find myself interested in the pale slate hue of her eyes as I start to feel a boredom with the surroundings. A chart or two down I notice the numbers are jumbling. Every time I read them they reorder. Lengthen, shorten, occasionally denature.
My occipital lobe is blunted…my ability to read being compromised. I realize I’m dreaming. Those parts of my mind are deadened or distracted. At least my body is resting.
With that I care little for the task. I splay out across the bed and snake an arm around her. Why not? Easy to have extra flirtatious confidence outside of reality. She laughs, rolls to one side then another. We edge close and press temples together to keep from a kiss. Careful and fearful like fumbling teenagers. I back off but enjoy her smile and return a teasing mirrored curve.
“We’re supposed to work together,” she posits, as her nose pokes against my cheekbone. Narrow, pointed. An exotic beak, it pushes me back slightly.
Another friend enters from a door that likely didn’t exist in this realm seconds ago. Tall and genial. Mocking us with a grin. My companion’s soft skin pulls away from mine bashfully and I sit upright, assuming the dream will shatter soon enough. At least I tried.
“You know she doesn’t want anything to do with you that way,” the intruding friend chuckles. I laugh too. Of course she doesn’t; my mind constructed her as an archetype of some desirable but unobtainable compelling force that is using me for unrewarding task work with a goal never to be made whole. She’s my career mixed with my desire to be wanted. I’m not exactly new to this game. I recognize the carrot, ma’am.
I half roll over to the couch, coiling against one of the armrests at the far side of this cramped little space, looking to take up some joking conversation or just wait to snap awake. “No idea where that notion came from,” I respond. Some pretty funny conversations have come from my odd lucid dreaming; let’s see what this fragment of my being has to offer.
But rather than a retort she offers a curious glance to my side, still smirking. I follow her gaze and there is my attempted partner, my apparition, at the end of my shoulder, smiling and leaning in. That tiny point of her nose grazes the side of my own as we meet for a kiss. It is hard, like awaking to find your jaw clenched, and I feel the teeth beneath. Though atop that pressure is the slightest softness of thin, inviting lips. The aura around us is sweet and comforting. Fresh laundry, a mothballed pillow, the misty air after a long shower. I was surprised. Shocked. Shocked awake.
I return to what I’ve accepted as reality and within that expanse I carry this cheery memory of the smiling blond girl with the pale eyes that might actually enjoy looking back into my own. I think little more of it. I carry about my waking life.
The next sleep finds me far elsewhere. The troubles in my head have compounded and the instincts of flight and fleet have brought me to a terminal. Both position and path. I think I’m past the security checkpoint but in this bustling place, rearranging in real time, I can’t say for certain. I wander by a baggage carousel and fumble through a long line of my possessions. Mostly. Some are odd color and pattern variations of items strewn about my living world. Put on a conveyer for all to see. For only me to recognize their true hue, their true purpose, the true memory woven within them. That which I hid away.
I grab a bag that has what I consider to be the optimal level of all my worldly presence and head up the stairs to await my next trip.
Frustratingly; waiting is all I can do. These bustling hallways present nothing to me but the glowing crawl of neon signs and the notably blank faces of a purgatorial pass-through. A chyron. A chrysalis.
I pull the weight of my worth on its wearing wheels and slump off to a side waiting area. Large plush beds. Some boutique version of the usual rows of ergonomically erratic one-row bleachers. Expansive and inviting. Sharable. I pick one with the fewest other travelers upon it and lay down my burdens at the 11 o’clock spot of a faded pink plush oval which could easily fit a dozen other weary wayfarers.
Not far from me a warm figure edges near. Glancing back once or twice, making her grey eyes ever so barely caught. Making her backward advance appear accidental as she occasionally nudges against me and tosses quick apologies over her shoulder. I welcome the touch. The simple presence of contact and a sharing of warmth. It’s seemed a long time to feel honest want. In fleet, maybe this miniscule piece of life is really all I was trying to find. For the first time in this trek I feel…connected…however oddly…to someone who isn’t a dream. She…she isn’t actually…oh…
I lace an arm along her hip. Not unlike my experience with the earthy-haired girl from the other night. And she curls into me. A subtle cyclone, pulling me closer into something odd. Anonymous yet tender. Pleasant yet somehow dark. There’s a hollow distance between our touching skin. Something isn’t right.
She turns and kisses me as if this is what these little stations were designed for. Perhaps they are and I simply can’t identify them as such. Perhaps they are and…I created them for such.
I’m dreaming. I’m asleep. Whatever hints I had before should have jolted me to realize it but her face makes it inescapable. Her kiss has the lightest layer of softness, but beneath is a stone row of teeth and birdlike hollow bone and every bit of affection as the simple scrape of a gravestone. Her skin is paler than even my own and her eyes show a swallowing depth; the only iris like the reflecting moonlight of an evening pond.
She’s Death. Calling me forth to run away. To escape. To fall in with the simple serenity of her touch and leave this life behind. To accept this slice of connection and ride it away from everything I once knew. I pull back from her skeletal salaciousness; every bit as on-display as my own beneath my withering skin, and I abandon my collections, abandon my comfortable perch; I leap back and over the edge of this pit and rush to the conscious world.
My mind is aching. For what it lacks in clarity it is not lacking in the jarring nature of the messages it sends. These attempts at escape, these cringing, fearful moments. The physical, painful, searing touch of neuron to neuron in what I just wish would be a peaceful place. There is a specter within it all. A grim portent.
Anxiety is a bizarre malady. One which puts a person in all spots at all times. I am at the very bad kiss I gave to my prom date right now. I'm laying against the wall of a Spokane hospital, about to be sent out of the room so my then-girlfriend could chat with her true crush. I'm laying on a lawn in Virginia being told to go away by one of the other apartment residents. I’m getting an award in the gymnasium of my high school in a field for which I always wanted to be valued, and seeing my parents in the bleachers, secretly invited. I'm chest deep in the Gulf of Mexico thinking the sea was only seconds from crushing me. I'm in Forrest County Hospital, being born at 3 in the morning. I'm at my very unfortunate death, I just don't know it yet. Or my idea of time progression blocks me from recognizing it.
I used to stay up late worrying about what would happen if I lived forever. I didn't want to die but I didn't want anything to end I didn't want anything to "never" end. I didn't want my parents or my hamster to die, but I didn't want to be stuck wanking around a "heaven" for all time. I wonder if all things are writ. One story happening simultaneously. We are in these acts at all times. Religious people talk about a god creating existence and scientists discuss the big bang but there's no conception for what precedes a beginning. Unless we are ill equipped to ever postulate something before that I wonder if we are all in the same moment at all times and it was so much that we reflexively made the experience linear. And that anxiety is just something shy of realizing it. Becoming unhinged. Living it all at once for a rapid, scarring, fleeting flashes.
I suppose the bright part of it is that while I'm in those moments I'm also shivering at a table outside an ice cream shop in Pullman being treated to a dollar scoop from a girl I’d come to love because it was a Tuesday. And I'm on top of Rainier overlooking the Nisqually glacier and seizing up, falling to a kneel because heights mess with me even though the view was beautiful beyond wording. I'm driving south from Spokane and reaching the point of the highway where the trees fade off and the chalky orange cliffsides ebb and the sky seems so enormous that it feels as if it could tangibly crush you. I'm in my parents' kitchen eating spaghetti and drinking wine on one of my first trips back from school.
I attempt to keep my mind in these nicer places as I hope for kinder sleep.
I come to, only to find myself waiting. A soft chair. Though the armrest digs into my ribs a bit. I’ve been shedding weight, I need to be careful about that.
A lobby of some sort. Old. A place that was made for economy rather than purpose. That’s ok. I’m not certain why I’m here, so maybe that’s fine. It feels fine. I look to the thin carpet scraping my shoe. An odd pattern that recalls a smattering of red onion slices. Those weird purple arcs. What a strange choice.
A voice apologized for my wait and I answer with my usual soft tone saying there’s no worry at all. There isn’t. Why would there be? I’m dreaming. This is a mental reconstruction of a building I used to have to traffic back in college. My head pulled a very strange detail to map its floor.
I pass through the muted tunneling hallways of this aged administrative building. One of the crumbling south-campus sections of peeled laminate and fake wood styling. Like the space-age promise of a basement rec room. Clouded window barriers and a thin shelf off to the side of…
She catches my arm and greets me slyly. It’s the same girl from the dream…weeks ago. The one I thought I’d not see again. Thatched blond hair and shy eyes. Those lips I kissed once. Suddenly I’m losing my lucidity and being around her has a level of intoxication. That presence, that simple desire. That possibility of being wanted…it’s there again.
She begs me wait a few more minutes before we reconnect. That must have been why I’m here…I’m here to meet her…here to take her to… Reality clouds further. She squeezes my hand and does the oddest little nuzzle of her cheek against my own. Entranced, I take a seat. Another waiting area. Not dissimilar from my starting point. Though this one still has that shelf I was looking at. I remember it held some attraction to it. Something that caught my eye.
Upon the shelf rests two small plastic bins. Thin spokes in the sides suggest an elementary school collection of markers and pencils but inside are miniaturized versions of that which occupies my real-life home. Furniture and appliances and clothes and…familiar pictures on the wall.
I hear a strange rattle at the back of my ear. I move closer to the arrangement. My possessions of the past near-decade writ small. Modeled. Like a dollhouse grab bag of that which surrounded me day to day. That noise keeps disrupting my attention though. A clattering. A ruckus. The patter of…
Rain. It’s raining in the real world. Which this is not. My living body can hear water upon the window. I’m dreaming. I’m asleep.
It morphs into a rapping at the wall. Subtle but unavoidable. Drawing my attention but I still can’t help but be drawn to these odd little trinkets. Abandoned and collected into a little plastic bin. Sat on a shelf to be cataloged or parceled out. My macro life made micro. The static outside grows louder. A rainstorm thrumming against these thin office walls.
She returns from her quick task and grasps my arm with an enthusiasm she seemed too shy to share in this sort of public place. A tenderness, an excitement she’d previously withheld. Calling me forth. Drawing me deeper into the depths of this structure. This comfortable, simple, organized, manageable structure. Led by someone seemingly shyly accepting of me, perhaps even oddly caring for me. I forget the sound of the storm for a moment.
The collection of my tiny homestead behind me flushes the haze out a bit. I just want to follow her joy. Which leads to a little repetitive, recursive waiting area deeper inside. A couple plush chairs aligned almost perfectly for us to just escape a while and await whatever task must be on the horizon. We sit, we curl against one another, we trade the softest of kisses. Tracing a trembling track down each neck. And I’m overjoyed at this affection towards me I didn’t think exis…
Our lips meet again and it’s that same light warm plushness overlaying stone given movement. Her teeth. I feel those teeth as much as the candied lips atop them. Similar to the fumbling confusion in the dorm room. And similar to the chilling forcefulness of the terminal.
The realization comes stark and harsh. My vision was blurred. My need to be appreciated clouded any intelligent realization I could have had. Arrogance. Negligence.
She is Death as well. Drawn in a different manner. Targeting a different part of me. Needling through a vulnerability all too easily exploited. Playing a longer game. Pleasant to the level of perfection yet no less fatal. Honestly much more dangerous. Because I was entranced, caught up in the idea of her and the slight spark in the slip of her skin running along mine, calmly, sweetly calling me to follow her into those depths. Dangerous because I was saddened to realize she is merely a shade of my subconscious and not some source of true affection. I wished she wasn’t a dream. The worst type from which to awake.
I looked into sheer and shattered metal reflections at different times over the past years and saw in them what I felt was a ghost of something. The Ghost of Olympia. The Ghost of Jefferson Street. The Ghost of the Palouse. The Ghost of a life left to languish. In starry-eyed time; the Ghost of some larger sect of life. Always the sheen and solitary shade of me wandering through the quiet night, A brother only to starlight. A citizen of the time between night and morning, Archivist of the few ashen hours of the day's reincarnation. The pale blue world that seems to stretch forever when your mind won't shut off. Azure is my favorite color and it's usually used to describe a clear blue sunny sky. This is the other azure. The blue that cracks not through the sky but the surrounding glow of a world set still. One of a day tentatively waiting for its predecessor to pass. A night pursuing rest. The slow pensive end of a chapter marked by its willful withholding from the stars and its defiant stance against the sun.
I keep taking on the visage of a ghost of our time. A wayfarer despite location, in some way. I was reading recently about a psychological malady labeled Cotard’s Syndrome, in which a person believes wholly that they are dead. Carrying along aimlessly. I found it a fascinating concept. An inverse of what I’ve felt these past years. I don’t know what the equivalent is for someone who believes they are bizarrely, illogically alive. Traversing a world that seems incapable of expelling my presence. Incapable of rest. Inexplicably awaking. Called back for something I cannot wistfully pinpoint.
I end another vigil, meeting the chirping presence of a slowly waking dawn, and block it out with drapes and eyelids.
I exit the station in which my desirous death works and attempted to hold me in place. The odd old recollection and cobbling of bizarre buildings of a more youthful time. It leads out to a crosswalk. With that stale building to my back I see to my left a familiar road. One that grew with me through childhood, adulthood, realization and escape. At its much-too-terminal end is the airport. Within it all the same dire remnants passing along the carousel and the grim, inviting mistress a floor above. I’m still in a daze, so while ominous, it stirs no fear in me. I can’t remember why I’ve come to this street. To the right: the road stretches much further. I see no end to it. Along its side, lining the intersection is some sort of bazaar or market. A smattering of little booths peddling their wares and swarmed by cheerful people looping between their rows of grins and gifts.
I’m not supposed to go there though, I sense.
I have an assignment. I find some folded instruction in my pocket. The handwriting atrocious and difficult to decipher. Though my handwriting is usually similarly atrocious, so I don’t begrudge the note.
To my back is the stale building, to my left the path to the terminal. To my right the vast road lined by the bazaar. But ahead of me is a long messy stairwell to a brick building I’m apparently directed towards. This side of the road is old. Far older than anything else near. The same mist that obscures the path to each side smears the vision of what must be present atop. I ascend. The stairs are wide and overbuilt. Not maintained in far too long. Collapsing in many places. Made of unassuming red brick, they begin to resemble a salmon run more than a hallowed path the further one follows. Whole steps wavering into pools of green water flowing from far above. Basically an entire entryway made of three-foot koi ponds lost to disrepair.
I reach the top. Inside is a simple library. Seemingly undeserving of such a stairwell. It wasn’t difficult to get to; not some grand trek, just illogical. Eliciting more pity than awe. The literary collection seemed uninteresting. Towards a corner was our assembly point; myself and a dozen other with the same marching orders. Sent to take some sort of bizarre test challenging our writing production.
I had to wait through several bizarre “trials” while mine came to a difference between meanings on a word that didn’t exist. Some word that, when put up on the projector for judgment, fluctuated with every look. Moving meaning. Altering application.
I suppose I’d be proud of such a quantum word. I wish I could bring it back to the living world. I wish…I wish. But sadly it didn’t exist. Because, I now see, I was dreaming and that part of my brain was in flux. Why? Why am I being delivered to this again and again?
I became more flippant than I generally am in reality and waited out this ongoing group trial until I could leave or awake. Over time I started to leave lucidity again. The dream seemed real enough as I tried to rest. This soft release, goofy as it may be, still felt hazily comforting. As I walked away from the strange court a group of the people observing; friends, by my sensing, stayed to ask how we’d all move forward. One in particular was a girl, of course. Tall, walnut-haired, piercing amber eyes. Wearing a scarf so white it was blinding bright. Like Pennsylvania snow. Like the teeth of the first dream of death. Like the slow light that brings me out of these jaunts through my psyche. But boots reflecting the muck we all had to traverse to reach this strange court. We must have known each other a while. Her soft smile peeled back and she said she was glad we were all fine. It was absurdly friendly and comforting. So much so…
A dream. Dammit.
So I ask if she wants to grab supper. This dream has gone on for quite a while, I realize. It must be ending soon.
She acts enthusiastic and agrees. Trying to arrange a time.
Idiocy. Infantile bullshit and paper dolls. My mind has constructed thin veils this time around. Totems with no nuance. I thought myself more creative than this. She is Death. Accepting me, drawing me out, sharing my ills. Casual Death. Comfortable Death. Hidden behind my imagined value.
I name some distant hour and make my way back down the swamp of stairs. Kicking past the settled algae and dim depths of ruined steps.
I emerge. Technically asleep. Oddly awake. At the base of these aging stairs I meet the road yet again. The fog thin enough to glimpse the old stone building, straight ahead of me. Somewhere inside presumably that girl with the thin lips and shy affections. To my right; the grandiose pathway out of everything with the horrid drowned concierge of a dark release. Behind me; what I can only assume is some form of me judging my own worth and rewarding myself with some gift that blinds me to that trap of staring into the galaxy of words and hoping to pluck out the perfect stars.
To my left is one more clouded street. Along it runs a sprawling grid of simple stands and humble, laughing, faceless presences. Enjoying whatever morning to which I must be awaking. Color and sound, however faint, fills the neighborhood. Presumably I’m supposed to look there too. I wonder what awaits?
I laugh. I laugh in my dream. I laugh in my wonder.
What will I find there?
To hazard a guess: a girl named Death.