I guess I’m looking for something inspirational… maybe the beginning.
Well, maybe not the beginning in a sense of time and space, but the beginning in terms of simplicity.
I suppose some things are the same. Sleeping, you look exactly as I remember. You still teeter on the edge of wakefulness to speak the same slumber-laden gibberish that you did years ago. The words are different, but the tone is the same, sprinkled with that familiar tired exasperation and endearing confusion. Your eyelids remain lazily shut—darkened theater curtains selfishly obstructing intense treasures—and your head doesn’t move as you spit your quiet nonsense into the cold room; an unknowing experimentation of syntax and language pulsing with a meaning that’s as beautiful as it is elusive.
You’re exhausted from picking through years of my scattered thoughts and harping on my desire to forget, to have new associations for different continents. Minutes ago, your prying eyes were hungry as Pavlov’s dogs, but now you’re worn out from playfully suggesting that it should all be about longing; tired from trying to rewrite my story in terms of you.
Right now, you’re dreaming about being the ubiquitous context.
I can feel the room getting smaller, shrinking to nothing more than two bodies on a mattress. The walls crumble without a sound and the floor silently dissipates like a thin fog. We’re floating through a wormhole, careening through a past that we’ve been trying to recreate for twenty-four hours. We’re flirting with smooth mosaics and innovative architecture in Barcelona. We’re sweating in London subways, hoping to see Guy Fawkes fireworks. We’re chasing away each other’s phobias, ascending to the apex of Christianity. And we’re falling apart in the moonlit gardens of New Jersey.
Without warning, you level the colonies of lint on the bedsheets with a dream-provoked spasm and I shuffle the same sheets that refuse to let you go. The cells of your skin are invincible and their microscopic grafting refuses to let me forget the way you looked spitting excess chocolate chips onto the soft grass of national parks; the way my sweatshirts hung from your slender frame; the way your feet never really let the tide escape.
If the remnants of you melt into the remnants of my dreams, then I can be sure these memories are worth less than the synapses they’re printed on.
Outside the sky explodes with dawn’s fluorescent watercolors. It reminds me of sitting in your backyard, seeing the lights and desperation of Atlantic City as electric sunrises we named after each other. It’s amazing how only months later the insanity of inner eyelids carried me towards images of alarm clocks splattered with brain fragments, where I could watch my mind melt seamlessly into time, controlling it with electric impulses, empowered by just the right cocktail of drugs. The neon numbers would absorb my memories like luminous sponges while my skull’s indentation flowered with crimson petals.
And so this sense of complication becomes almost filthy. It’s distracting in the way a slight but consistent click from some appliance can keep you awake in a silent room; the way a small fly on a large television screen can command your attention in a way that seems so extreme. In the context of stillness, you become more attuned to any distractions. And in the face of possible perfection, the flaws become exaggerated and all-too apparent.
I guess you can never really go back in time, as marketable an escape as that may be. We’re designed to be linear, pressing forward for better or worse. We’re all about momentum; gazes plastered to what’s in front of us. This is why we don’t have eyes in the back of our heads… we can never truly move backwards.
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