all my good dreams always end
fuckin', way to go writer's block, just glue my motionless fingertips to a keyboard while i sit thinking and staring, thanks, fuck you. it's a windy day, with threatening clouds.
it was an even windier night, or had been. i fell asleep after it died down. closed the window. it was quieter than usual. magnified i suppose by the missing wind and the electronic device i had turned off, the fan of which i can usually hear....fanning, FUCK, COME ON already. jeez.
it took me about an hour to tell (and retell) the story to myself, revising it as i tried to dream it along. lying in bed with the wool pulled down over my eyes to block out the late-late morning sunlight. imagining myself back in the dream where i'd left it, and now telling her the story. "her" story. um...heh. but it was only parts of my history after all.
but the dream, i guess. meh. we were a bunch of nondescript college kids. no one else was real, i mean i don't remember anyone else from real life. i thiiiiink it was a professor, got us all really super stoned. for some reason he kept saying "lemons" or was preaching that you should just say 'lemons' when you're stoned and it...what, kept you safe? was a magical fix-it spell? i dunno, as if to demonstrate, (we were on campus, a group) he was stopped/accosted by a police, heywutzabigidea, to which he replied 'lemons!' and then we all just acted like we were excited and acting dopey because we all really enjoyed lemonade. nice, eat dicks, dream.
then i was walking through a parking lot, i can only assume i was headed towards my dorm because that's where i ended up next, and i was pretty stoned, only i was thinking about how much i missed getting stoned, and how great i used to feel as i was 'coming down' or like, just relaxing after being really high. whatever. maybe i was stoned and thinking gee i really miss this. because i do. getting good n' baked used to be the best thing ever. and i was thinking how i should tell sarita to just get really high, at least once, just one time. since i thought at the time she was gonna "do drugs" anyway. i wander...
into the...frat house? the co-ed frat house? where i'm the only guy? alright, now that's better dream, thanks. through a couple doors, i'm tired, it's late, i'm gonna go to sleep. through a door into my room, to find ashley sleeping in it. what? it's a dream, and we're both young again. i dunno, it's not like i've even thought about her in forever. all the old, old feelings come back and i'm like, oh yeah, ashley. asleep in my room. there's some extra futon mats one room over, and i think about pulling them in here and just going to sleep, and i start to, but then think better of it. i guess i think about how i never really got to tell the story to her. her story. so i reach out to shake her shoulder, to wake her up...and instead end up waking myself. but the dream is still kinda there, juuuuuust fading. and i latch onto it, desperately, already bent on the idea that i'll come right back to it, i'll just get up and use the bathroom and i'll come right back to it. as it starts to slip away i'm looking around frantically trying to commit every detail to memory. just...stay right there, i'll
be back. it's late morning. i use the bathroom. wander out to the fridge. eat a handful of blackberries and some milk. lay back down, but i'm pretty sure at this point that it's hopeless. i'm not even tired, though i wish i was. godammit consciousness, i was about to have this great story-telling catharsis whereupon in my dream, i find an old crush sleeping in my room, wake her up and get to tell her this great story, her story, filled with meaning and coincidence.
in the end i just try and make do. it took me about an hour to tell (and retell) the story to myself, revising it as i tried to dream it along. lying in bed with the wool pulled down over my eyes...the part i'd never really noticed before was right at the beginning.
i forget what we'd been up to during all of that night, what happened, where we might've gone. it could've been a party out in phelan. maybe it was the night we drove out to some random bend of road in wrightwood and i stood freezing in the wind while jade made out with thom. regardless, we ended up at denny's like we had, and would, so many times. because hey, it was open. we were done eating, done being inside, but not quite ready to call it the night it was. outside, sitting on a curb, staring at the gutter as the sky slowly grew brighter. and i remember cursing the dawn! and regaling everyone of my hatred for it, how rude and sudden and bright it was. how it meant the night was done, and the noise it brought. the clamor of it. and i cursed and hated it. and i guess once i got that out of my system there was nothing else for it. jade and thom left in his grey van, and i in my dad's white mazda. driving east down main street, towards the dawn.
and O, the sky.
the dawn wasn't breaking, it was demolishing itself upon the horizon like there would never be another night. it was the most beautiful thing i have seen, and likely ever will. the mountains were covered in thunder and lightning. the sun was rising through it, behind it, and as i stared, seemed to rise directly from it. as though the storm itself was some primordial nebulae giving birth. you cannot imagine what i saw. i know this because i saw it, sat staring at it for what seemed like hours, and i can't even remember exactly what it looked like. all i can see when i try to picture it is one part of it at a time. how the sun gradually painted the storm with oranges and reds, the way it glowed through the dark clouds, so you thought you could see through them. and i know there was lightning, and that it was the most amazing part. it would've flashed around the sun, complementing and competing with it, but i just can't see it anymore. i had to look at everything at once, to see all of it.
i've told this story a few times. i've told it, and you probably think it's obvious, but i never, honestly never before noticed how not an hour ago i'd been cursing and ranting on about my hatred for what was just now...dawning on me. or how my anger with the dawn could have 'been' the storm, the sun battling it's way up from behind the world, simply magnifying it's beauty. i didn't know. i couldn't have.
i would've told all this to her, had i been able to sleep long enough to wake her. instead i was talking to a sleeping girl, while i pretended i was dreaming still.
i had driven a couple miles when it became too much, and i had to pull over to watch it or risk causing an accident, my attention being utterly demanded by it. i turned onto the dirt patch off topaz, turned a song on repeat and climbed on top of the car to sit and stare. and stare. and stare. and then i had a combination of thoughts all at once, that i wish there was someone else there with me to share it with, regret that i hadn't brought this to anyone else's attention yet, and hope that i could reach jade's house (less than a couple miles away) in time to share it with her. so i'm off, driving wreckless down main, swerving onto side streets and sliding, literally skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust out on the curb, practically out of the car before it's stopped and running for the door, which she's opening now, wondering "who got shot?" not even realizing how worked up i am or how strange it probably looks. i was a very excited person back then. "HAVE YOU SEEN THE SKY!?!?" i almost yelled. ha, and she's like, oh yeah, that. yeah me n thom sat and watched it for a bit. and we wandered out onto the street to see if we could catch any more of the view, but it was over. and she told me i'd freaked her out, but it was whatever and i left.
and life went on, we hung out with ashley some more i guess. i wasn't even interested in her at the time, i just thought she was kinda cute. i was probably still trying to 'get over' jade or something. i remember when we met (ashley) i'd been sent over to pick her up, and i had this mp3 mix with a lot of cure and smiths songs on it, which she was really into at the time. oh well. weeks went by, days maybe, i dunno, until one day jade told me, how she had told ashley, about how i had come crashing up to her home shouting about the sky. and jade told me how that had made ashley "excited". --what do you mean, excited!? --i dunno...excited. she tells me, and something clicks into place. usually that's all it takes for me to fall for someone. i'm pretty well hopeless after that. in the months that followed. my thing with ashley was how she always, always managed to say the most perfect things. at least to me they were. she could just utter a phrase, a sentence, and i'd be floored by it like it was the most profound truth. i remember one time smiling forever because of how she'd said she was making scarves, and how she'd make one for me in 'fall colors' because either she pictured me in them or thought i would 'look good' in fall colors. sheesh.
and then she'd mentioned this song by the anniversary, but could only describe it, having forgotten the name. until i figured it out, but didn't tell her, wanting to save it for a surprise. it being a song i myself had held an obsession with over the years, a song almost equal in meaning to the one this story, her story, is all about. i believed that the end of the reign of terror was soon near.
our sometimes nightly ritual back then was to drive up to any one of several vantage points surrounding the desert and just sit and gaze down upon it. to soak up and in the visceral portrait of it all. each point had it's own mood, character, and traditions. and each one was my favorite. but A.V. road's was unmatched in complexity. we'd drive up, north past the last house, where it turned to dirt to hang out. and what we started doing was, when it was time to leave, we'd turn off the headlights and people would get up on the hood of the car while i kept it in neutral, rolling all the way down and into a parking space at a gas station on the corner, at the bottom. yes, this was stupid. we were young. we went about thus.
ashley's birthday was coming up, and i guess i got pretty excited. i had all these plans, all these notions. i made this mix cd for her (yeah, i know right) and the very last track i put on it was the anniversary song she'd been wanting to hear, the one she said she'd loved. but wait, there's more. i called it "the cake mix" and jade, bless her soul, baked a real-ass cake, which she then managed to hide this mix cd, the cake mix, inside of. we ended up at starbucks, with the cake, and i got the whole crowded place to sing happy birthday to her, which i can't help but imagine getting embarrassed about now. i was also a lot less self-conscious back then. ha, we made such a mess. oh man. i think she didn't even want to eat the cake at first, but jade grabbed her hand, put the knife in it, and made her cut into, knowing what was inside, and how my plans for that night depended on it's discovery. because that night we were heading up to a.v. road, where i would hand the reins of the mazda over to jade. and she would guide us down, with the windows open, while ashley and me sat on the hood as the song she loved by the anniversary was playing.
i dunno. shrug. i'm pretty sure at the time i was convinced she liked me or something. and that something in those moments would go click the way it had inside me a while back, and that would be that. she was a witch, but this was my magic spell, my way of casting it. the moments came and went. we arrived at the gas station at the bottom of a.v. road, my feelings unrequited. i think it was cold that night too. i did receive a consolation prize however, in that she recognized the song playing as we coasted down the street. i think i can remember her smiling, and for me the dreamer, that being enough.
so again, life did it's going on. and on. things happen and unravel in a giant hazy ball in my memory from here on out. at some point in time, months later perhaps, jade tells me...a secret? i don't think she was supposed to tell me, and well she didn't, not all of it, not yet anyway. i guess ashley had liked that i put some thought into her birthday and was "working on a surprise" for mine. and that was the secret. i probably felt pretty good about that for a while.
but then, a while had passed, and she slept with and/or fooled around with several of my best friends in relatively quick succession. and i was over it. maybe the desire was still there, but when it's surrounded by that much drama it's difficult to appreciate. maybe i would've still wanted her, but more, i would've wanted her not to have been with all my friends. maybe i had a hard time getting over her, i can't recall. i probably did. the memory, if nothing else of my feelings, remained and would be remembered from time to time, until it was forgotten completely, and that would be that. but before it was, jade, with her careless wisdom, would bring this story finally to it's end. by taking it right back to it's origin. and it's about time because it's mid afternoon, i've been writing for hours, and i'm just about sick of this story.
it was years later, it must have been. and ashley was by this time, just the memory she would be. as i'm sure i am to some others at this point. i think it was after jade came back from san luis obispo, and i think we might've been in her ford escort, rosemary, but i'm quite certain that we were at the bottom of the hill on the the I-15, heading up to the desert when she brought up ashley, or the conversation turned in her direction. and i wanted to know what she had been working on all that time ago, as a surprise for my birthday. the beans, at last from jade, spilled forth. she had been learning a song on piano, to play for me. a song i had tucked randomly into the cake mix. the same song i'd had on repeat as i was staring at the sunrise, which put me in such a mood that i could only break out of it desperately, remembering myself, rushing over to jade's house to ask frantically if she'd seen the sky? sometimes i just go for it, some emo piano piece by 'the used' singer, bert.
and there, rather anticlimactically, you have it. her story. that song with the sunrise helped drive me insane enough that morning, without which, i might never have screamed at jade about the sky, so she wouldn've been able to tell her friend about it, who would've never gotten excited, or told me about it, causing me to fall for her and focus all these plans around her birthday, and she would then plan to surprise me with something on mine. that song. i remember going on and on about the randomness of it all as we drove up the hill back to the desert, finally knowing what her surprise would have been. only then telling jade for the first time what no one had known, that i'd been listening to that song over and over that morning. the morning i saw the sky.
it takes almost an hour for me to tell her story to her, fake-sleeping in my pretend dream. sleeping because it's simpler to imagine that way. easier to tell. but i'm tired of this story now, and don't even care why my mind deposited her in my dorm room asleep in the first place. i wake her up, pretending for just a moment more to dream, and then i climb out of bed.
it was an even windier night, or had been. i fell asleep after it died down. closed the window. it was quieter than usual. magnified i suppose by the missing wind and the electronic device i had turned off, the fan of which i can usually hear....fanning, FUCK, COME ON already. jeez.
it took me about an hour to tell (and retell) the story to myself, revising it as i tried to dream it along. lying in bed with the wool pulled down over my eyes to block out the late-late morning sunlight. imagining myself back in the dream where i'd left it, and now telling her the story. "her" story. um...heh. but it was only parts of my history after all.
but the dream, i guess. meh. we were a bunch of nondescript college kids. no one else was real, i mean i don't remember anyone else from real life. i thiiiiink it was a professor, got us all really super stoned. for some reason he kept saying "lemons" or was preaching that you should just say 'lemons' when you're stoned and it...what, kept you safe? was a magical fix-it spell? i dunno, as if to demonstrate, (we were on campus, a group) he was stopped/accosted by a police, heywutzabigidea, to which he replied 'lemons!' and then we all just acted like we were excited and acting dopey because we all really enjoyed lemonade. nice, eat dicks, dream.
then i was walking through a parking lot, i can only assume i was headed towards my dorm because that's where i ended up next, and i was pretty stoned, only i was thinking about how much i missed getting stoned, and how great i used to feel as i was 'coming down' or like, just relaxing after being really high. whatever. maybe i was stoned and thinking gee i really miss this. because i do. getting good n' baked used to be the best thing ever. and i was thinking how i should tell sarita to just get really high, at least once, just one time. since i thought at the time she was gonna "do drugs" anyway. i wander...
into the...frat house? the co-ed frat house? where i'm the only guy? alright, now that's better dream, thanks. through a couple doors, i'm tired, it's late, i'm gonna go to sleep. through a door into my room, to find ashley sleeping in it. what? it's a dream, and we're both young again. i dunno, it's not like i've even thought about her in forever. all the old, old feelings come back and i'm like, oh yeah, ashley. asleep in my room. there's some extra futon mats one room over, and i think about pulling them in here and just going to sleep, and i start to, but then think better of it. i guess i think about how i never really got to tell the story to her. her story. so i reach out to shake her shoulder, to wake her up...and instead end up waking myself. but the dream is still kinda there, juuuuuust fading. and i latch onto it, desperately, already bent on the idea that i'll come right back to it, i'll just get up and use the bathroom and i'll come right back to it. as it starts to slip away i'm looking around frantically trying to commit every detail to memory. just...stay right there, i'll
be back. it's late morning. i use the bathroom. wander out to the fridge. eat a handful of blackberries and some milk. lay back down, but i'm pretty sure at this point that it's hopeless. i'm not even tired, though i wish i was. godammit consciousness, i was about to have this great story-telling catharsis whereupon in my dream, i find an old crush sleeping in my room, wake her up and get to tell her this great story, her story, filled with meaning and coincidence.
in the end i just try and make do. it took me about an hour to tell (and retell) the story to myself, revising it as i tried to dream it along. lying in bed with the wool pulled down over my eyes...the part i'd never really noticed before was right at the beginning.
i forget what we'd been up to during all of that night, what happened, where we might've gone. it could've been a party out in phelan. maybe it was the night we drove out to some random bend of road in wrightwood and i stood freezing in the wind while jade made out with thom. regardless, we ended up at denny's like we had, and would, so many times. because hey, it was open. we were done eating, done being inside, but not quite ready to call it the night it was. outside, sitting on a curb, staring at the gutter as the sky slowly grew brighter. and i remember cursing the dawn! and regaling everyone of my hatred for it, how rude and sudden and bright it was. how it meant the night was done, and the noise it brought. the clamor of it. and i cursed and hated it. and i guess once i got that out of my system there was nothing else for it. jade and thom left in his grey van, and i in my dad's white mazda. driving east down main street, towards the dawn.
and O, the sky.
the dawn wasn't breaking, it was demolishing itself upon the horizon like there would never be another night. it was the most beautiful thing i have seen, and likely ever will. the mountains were covered in thunder and lightning. the sun was rising through it, behind it, and as i stared, seemed to rise directly from it. as though the storm itself was some primordial nebulae giving birth. you cannot imagine what i saw. i know this because i saw it, sat staring at it for what seemed like hours, and i can't even remember exactly what it looked like. all i can see when i try to picture it is one part of it at a time. how the sun gradually painted the storm with oranges and reds, the way it glowed through the dark clouds, so you thought you could see through them. and i know there was lightning, and that it was the most amazing part. it would've flashed around the sun, complementing and competing with it, but i just can't see it anymore. i had to look at everything at once, to see all of it.
i've told this story a few times. i've told it, and you probably think it's obvious, but i never, honestly never before noticed how not an hour ago i'd been cursing and ranting on about my hatred for what was just now...dawning on me. or how my anger with the dawn could have 'been' the storm, the sun battling it's way up from behind the world, simply magnifying it's beauty. i didn't know. i couldn't have.
i would've told all this to her, had i been able to sleep long enough to wake her. instead i was talking to a sleeping girl, while i pretended i was dreaming still.
i had driven a couple miles when it became too much, and i had to pull over to watch it or risk causing an accident, my attention being utterly demanded by it. i turned onto the dirt patch off topaz, turned a song on repeat and climbed on top of the car to sit and stare. and stare. and stare. and then i had a combination of thoughts all at once, that i wish there was someone else there with me to share it with, regret that i hadn't brought this to anyone else's attention yet, and hope that i could reach jade's house (less than a couple miles away) in time to share it with her. so i'm off, driving wreckless down main, swerving onto side streets and sliding, literally skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust out on the curb, practically out of the car before it's stopped and running for the door, which she's opening now, wondering "who got shot?" not even realizing how worked up i am or how strange it probably looks. i was a very excited person back then. "HAVE YOU SEEN THE SKY!?!?" i almost yelled. ha, and she's like, oh yeah, that. yeah me n thom sat and watched it for a bit. and we wandered out onto the street to see if we could catch any more of the view, but it was over. and she told me i'd freaked her out, but it was whatever and i left.
and life went on, we hung out with ashley some more i guess. i wasn't even interested in her at the time, i just thought she was kinda cute. i was probably still trying to 'get over' jade or something. i remember when we met (ashley) i'd been sent over to pick her up, and i had this mp3 mix with a lot of cure and smiths songs on it, which she was really into at the time. oh well. weeks went by, days maybe, i dunno, until one day jade told me, how she had told ashley, about how i had come crashing up to her home shouting about the sky. and jade told me how that had made ashley "excited". --what do you mean, excited!? --i dunno...excited. she tells me, and something clicks into place. usually that's all it takes for me to fall for someone. i'm pretty well hopeless after that. in the months that followed. my thing with ashley was how she always, always managed to say the most perfect things. at least to me they were. she could just utter a phrase, a sentence, and i'd be floored by it like it was the most profound truth. i remember one time smiling forever because of how she'd said she was making scarves, and how she'd make one for me in 'fall colors' because either she pictured me in them or thought i would 'look good' in fall colors. sheesh.
and then she'd mentioned this song by the anniversary, but could only describe it, having forgotten the name. until i figured it out, but didn't tell her, wanting to save it for a surprise. it being a song i myself had held an obsession with over the years, a song almost equal in meaning to the one this story, her story, is all about. i believed that the end of the reign of terror was soon near.
our sometimes nightly ritual back then was to drive up to any one of several vantage points surrounding the desert and just sit and gaze down upon it. to soak up and in the visceral portrait of it all. each point had it's own mood, character, and traditions. and each one was my favorite. but A.V. road's was unmatched in complexity. we'd drive up, north past the last house, where it turned to dirt to hang out. and what we started doing was, when it was time to leave, we'd turn off the headlights and people would get up on the hood of the car while i kept it in neutral, rolling all the way down and into a parking space at a gas station on the corner, at the bottom. yes, this was stupid. we were young. we went about thus.
ashley's birthday was coming up, and i guess i got pretty excited. i had all these plans, all these notions. i made this mix cd for her (yeah, i know right) and the very last track i put on it was the anniversary song she'd been wanting to hear, the one she said she'd loved. but wait, there's more. i called it "the cake mix" and jade, bless her soul, baked a real-ass cake, which she then managed to hide this mix cd, the cake mix, inside of. we ended up at starbucks, with the cake, and i got the whole crowded place to sing happy birthday to her, which i can't help but imagine getting embarrassed about now. i was also a lot less self-conscious back then. ha, we made such a mess. oh man. i think she didn't even want to eat the cake at first, but jade grabbed her hand, put the knife in it, and made her cut into, knowing what was inside, and how my plans for that night depended on it's discovery. because that night we were heading up to a.v. road, where i would hand the reins of the mazda over to jade. and she would guide us down, with the windows open, while ashley and me sat on the hood as the song she loved by the anniversary was playing.
i dunno. shrug. i'm pretty sure at the time i was convinced she liked me or something. and that something in those moments would go click the way it had inside me a while back, and that would be that. she was a witch, but this was my magic spell, my way of casting it. the moments came and went. we arrived at the gas station at the bottom of a.v. road, my feelings unrequited. i think it was cold that night too. i did receive a consolation prize however, in that she recognized the song playing as we coasted down the street. i think i can remember her smiling, and for me the dreamer, that being enough.
so again, life did it's going on. and on. things happen and unravel in a giant hazy ball in my memory from here on out. at some point in time, months later perhaps, jade tells me...a secret? i don't think she was supposed to tell me, and well she didn't, not all of it, not yet anyway. i guess ashley had liked that i put some thought into her birthday and was "working on a surprise" for mine. and that was the secret. i probably felt pretty good about that for a while.
but then, a while had passed, and she slept with and/or fooled around with several of my best friends in relatively quick succession. and i was over it. maybe the desire was still there, but when it's surrounded by that much drama it's difficult to appreciate. maybe i would've still wanted her, but more, i would've wanted her not to have been with all my friends. maybe i had a hard time getting over her, i can't recall. i probably did. the memory, if nothing else of my feelings, remained and would be remembered from time to time, until it was forgotten completely, and that would be that. but before it was, jade, with her careless wisdom, would bring this story finally to it's end. by taking it right back to it's origin. and it's about time because it's mid afternoon, i've been writing for hours, and i'm just about sick of this story.
it was years later, it must have been. and ashley was by this time, just the memory she would be. as i'm sure i am to some others at this point. i think it was after jade came back from san luis obispo, and i think we might've been in her ford escort, rosemary, but i'm quite certain that we were at the bottom of the hill on the the I-15, heading up to the desert when she brought up ashley, or the conversation turned in her direction. and i wanted to know what she had been working on all that time ago, as a surprise for my birthday. the beans, at last from jade, spilled forth. she had been learning a song on piano, to play for me. a song i had tucked randomly into the cake mix. the same song i'd had on repeat as i was staring at the sunrise, which put me in such a mood that i could only break out of it desperately, remembering myself, rushing over to jade's house to ask frantically if she'd seen the sky? sometimes i just go for it, some emo piano piece by 'the used' singer, bert.
and there, rather anticlimactically, you have it. her story. that song with the sunrise helped drive me insane enough that morning, without which, i might never have screamed at jade about the sky, so she wouldn've been able to tell her friend about it, who would've never gotten excited, or told me about it, causing me to fall for her and focus all these plans around her birthday, and she would then plan to surprise me with something on mine. that song. i remember going on and on about the randomness of it all as we drove up the hill back to the desert, finally knowing what her surprise would have been. only then telling jade for the first time what no one had known, that i'd been listening to that song over and over that morning. the morning i saw the sky.
it takes almost an hour for me to tell her story to her, fake-sleeping in my pretend dream. sleeping because it's simpler to imagine that way. easier to tell. but i'm tired of this story now, and don't even care why my mind deposited her in my dorm room asleep in the first place. i wake her up, pretending for just a moment more to dream, and then i climb out of bed.