A Dream

I swim clothed through water cold and black. I am in a marsh or swamp of some kind and I push through roots and stalks and detritus. To my left, I believe, is the end of the world. I can see abandoned houses, but they are off the map, beyond the border, unreachable. One sits closer to me than the rest. Laid over the edge of the front porch, its neck arched, head resting on the bottom step, is a horse recently dead. I look behind me and see other horses struggling through the water towards me. Though they struggle, they seem at peace. I struggle, too.

I step gingerly through woods newly clothed in snow. The world is now devoid of color. We do not walk together. We do not often walk together. You are always ahead. I trample the imprints your shoe has pushed into the powder in boots a size too big. 

Some things that I remember

I remember rolling decades old matchbox cars down lengths of decades old orange, plastic track across a decades old living room under the watchful gaze of a decades old grandmother who had watched my father do the same. Wind could be heard blowing down the chimney. The cat's bell clattering as it turned a corner.

I remember peering over the top edge of a lawn chair and the sudden and panicked fear that I felt as I unexpectedly tipped over the edge and dropped onto the rocks below. I have forgotten the pain.

I remember the barn behind my aunt's house encircled with blackberry bushes. 

I remember being thrown over Austin Weaver's shoulder during an altercation. Was it cold outside? I walked away in tears.

I remember one brother throwing the other over the bed and the way the window shattered when his foot flew through it.

I remember riding my bicycle home in the cold, wishing I had stayed right where I was.

I remember a thunderstorm summoned.

I remember the scars stretched across skin.

I remember hiding under the rear seat of my parent's Peugeot.

I remember being afraid of darkness. 

I remember building gasoline bombs in my neighbor's garage. 

I remember four of us in my basement, asleep and content.

I remember the pain that took my breath away. Feelings of loss and betrayal. 

I remember a darkened basement and pedaling in circles, and children laughing.

Circa April 7th, 2005

You are easily the most enjoyable aspect of my life.

Circa October 5th, 2006

The other day I doodled my gravestone onto a page. The epitaph read:

"There's nothing wrong with anything."

Testimony

I lie to myself and, as a result, I lie to others. The truth is that I am heartbroken. That this feeling hasn't changed in the slightest in the past however many months. That admitting this to myself causes me to feel a hopelessness that I haven't ever felt before. That what I lost I will never get back. I am overwhelmed with regret. I am nothing more than a familiar face, and I can't decide if that's enough. 

18

Nowhere to go

Nothing to do

But sit in this room

And think about you

Now

Fortune had smiled on us once, her face a radiant glow that warmed our naked limbs. But fate has plunged a knife, jagged and cold, deep into our chests and we now lay bleeding out on the floors of prisons of our own design, the dim light of day fading farther beyond horizons we will never reach, turning slowly to a night that will last forever. 

Hold close these fleeting, final images of beauty and freedom glimpsed through the rusted bars. Ignorance and fear form the foundations on which our respective cells are built. Trapped by inevitability; there is no escape, only surrender. Only darkness. Only solitude. Only death. 

Unless...

Spring

Gray skies above, small puddles of water pooled at the edges of the sidewalk, and the brilliant green of spring grass stood to the side, radiant.

And I wish that the world was flat so that I could walk to its edge and fall into the sky.

Bloody Knuckles

The last time they kissed she pulled away in pain. And as he walked down the hallway the shock of disconnection lingered on his lips. And he swung at the wall wondering if his face would ever linger over hers again, their breathing a slow, rhythmic syncopation, staring deep into dark eyes filled with longing, their hearts beating in time, counting down to a happier end.

Dating

They had met out of necessity, having been pressed rudely together in the surge and crush of commuters moving on and off the train; the currents opposed and the two of them caught in the midst. She seemed vaguely subcultural, her hair dyed a deep black and her eye shadow a bit heavier in its application than could be considered stylish. He seemed intentionally unshaven, his sweater ill-fitting; the kind of guy that had a tattoo, but only one, and certainly of nothing outrageous. He had made some joking remark, now forgotten, upon being first forced against her and she had smiled sympathetically. His timing was poor and the joke clichéd, but he was attractive enough to warrant a smile. Names had been exchanged along with, perhaps, a remark about the weather before they had lapsed into a silence that seemed final. He thought briefly of all the other attractive young women he had met in circumstances similar to this only to have them disappear moments later into a world too large for coincidence to ever bring them together again. It was a surprise, then, when they found themselves stepping through the doors together, expelled quite forcefully from the metal opening of the train and the mass of commuters inside. The conversation began anew. More smiles. More jokes. He, stumbling over his words, asked her out to dinner. She haltingly agreed. Phone numbers were exchanged.  

A handful of weeks had passed and they found themselves now lounging naked on top of the covers, all in disarray, on her bed. The room lit only by the soft, incandescent glow of old Christmas lights strung haphazardly across the ceiling. He traced soft circles and figure-eights over her hand and arm with his finger as he stared absentmindedly at a French poster she had tacked to her wall; for absinthe or something else. A robed woman, drawn in the Art-Nouveau style, poured a large decanter of green liquid into the sky, the contours and curves of the liquid matching very nearly the contours and curves of her flowing golden hair. He was suddenly struck with the uncanny feeling of existing within a memory; not deja vu, per se, but an honest-to-goodness recurrence. The feeling came from the past. It was a nostalgic feeling. After a moment of reflection he remembered that his first girlfriend in high school had stuck the same poster up on the wall of the small room she had lived in above her parents' garage. She had strung some old Christmas lights in a similar criss-across her ceiling. And he had laid in this very position, naked and slightly stoned as she awkwardly fellated him for the first time. He had not spoken to that girl in nearly six years and he could not help but wonder where she was and what she had become. He thought that he had loved her and he wondered if he was falling in love again.

It would, of course, end eventually a few weeks later. They would become entirely too familiar with the shapes hidden beneath each others' clothing; her bare breasts no longer provoking for him sudden erections. His sexual inadequacies becoming over time less and less hidden behind or overshadowed by the newness and excitement of the act for her. He would quickly run out of amusing anecdotes to relay to her and would resort to simply pretending that he had forgotten he had told them before and would tell them again hoping for the same adulation she had heaped on him the first time around. But he would be met only with exasperation and curt reminders that he had told her these things already. And she would soon grow anxious in silences that increased exponentially in length as they sat across from one another in the same restaurants they had been going to for months now, feeling as though their inability to converse reflected something fundamentally uninteresting about the two of them, or more specifically, her. And so it would come as a bittersweet relief to them both when she, drunk and fed-up, would go home one night from a party with a guy with an eyebrow piercing. She would meet him the next day at his apartment and say, almost hopefully, “I slept with someone else last night.” He would remember later feeling mostly relieved; but, understanding the importance of maintaining appearances, would launch into a rant so furious that she would almost believe that he was actually upset. They would then hug for the last time as she stepped across the threshold of his door and, turning, would say, “I hope we keep in touch.” 

They would not. And the only evidence that would be left of their ever having touched at all would be the few pubic hairs they would inadvertently leave between each others' sheets.

We Don't Deserve It

The feeling, when it comes, is nearly impossible to be imagined by or described to those who have not felt it before. It assaults her body and her mind simultaneously. She is left crippled and nauseated, without hope or happiness. There is frustration, too;  an overwhelming feeling that escape from the burdens of those failings, those setbacks, those countless obstacles which have been amplified a thousand-fold would be easily reached if only she could find her way out. But there is no out, and she lies immobile on her bed instead, unwashed and unfed. Isolated and choking on tears that never come. Waiting for a future that could not possibly be any worse; for tomorrows that, as far as she's concerned, have all ended today.

I Travel Through Time

Down the quiet hallway and up the silent steps he crept so as not to disturb the sleeping occupants of the house. Like a thief or assassin through darkness and dust to his bed tucked in a tight corner. And alone he wrapped himself in blankets of many colors. And alone he let his thoughts drift from a head pillow-bound to other places and times. The flickering of a streetlight in time to the pulse he can hear throbbing within his own head. 

And so he closes his eyes and hopes.