In Defense of Feeling

IN DEFENSE OF FEELING

IN DEFENSE OF FEELING

JAKE PFAHL

LONELINESS // APATHY // LOVE // FEAR // REGRET // AWE // LOVE (REVISITED) 1 1

In Defense Of Feeling Jake Pfahl

“ I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth, I dream’d that was the new city of Friends, Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest, It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words. “

-Walt Whitman

LONELINESS // APATHY // LOVE // REGRET // FEAR // AWE // LOVE // (REVISITED)

LONELINESS APATHY LOVE REGRET FEAR AWE

I couldn’t recognize a single soul that moved about my own party, I was impartial to the idea.

And when the apartment emptied, a small dress— a smaller girl lead me through her bedroom.

I think she felt sorry for me because I didn’t know her name, and I was another year older.

This is me: In Loneliness

In Exploring the Adult Playground or The Brilliant Light She sighed in an attempt to erase the alcohol from her bloodstream. I gave her a few moments to get comfortable and decide where she wanted to stay for the night. Almost comfortable enough to where she couldn’t move or escape as a result of complacency or nostalgia. I could see the reflection of some brilliant light mating in the door of the microwave in that usual time of night when I thought about eating anything to avoid thought and I could see it in her eyes and I could feel it in mine that the ceiling was no longer flat and the room was no longer still. Everything kept moving. Everything kept spinning. And my only reaction was to sigh in return.

I think that what happened between us in the absence of light and sound was good. But in the moments that I laid unmoving so the stillness allowed her not to feel the need to get up when I did, I could feel my eyes gaining the same weight.

She nestled closer, stopping to evaluate the landing midway, and shortened the space between once more until I could feel her body and nothing else. The air between us was warmer than the air around us. It made me feel unequal. Imbalanced. Her lips sticking to my skin and leaving a wet trail along the way as they followed her head that formed into the new-age pillow as the commercial had promised. Small but colorful, they added something to the room—a hue only apparent in a certain light.

The walls were blank except for the manila gradient imposed by the lamp illuminating the corner over her shoulder and reverberating onto the neighboring corners with a fraction of the intensity. Poorly, but warmly, it lit the space.

L O N E L I N E S S

I couldn’t see much besides the colors still reflecting in the kitchen. The apartment was so small that all of the rooms were visible from any of the rooms and I began to sweat from the heat of her. I could feel the beads racing each other down to the sheets—a delta between two bodies. They didn’t run quickly. Nothing in the room moved quickly. It all came in slow waves.

I exhaled again trying to get things to stop moving or at least slow down. Not in the same attempt to discard the alcohol from my body, but discard myself from the room. Discard the inside of myself from the outside. This time I was trying to exhale the space between us, or lack thereof.

I didn’t know how to feel about her not saying much. Maybe this was something she did often, and something she didn’t want to talk about. Maybe she was thinking what I was thinking. Or maybe she was just asleep. I began to plan my exit. I would:

Tilt my head, and kiss the top of her for insurance.

Balance myself, and shift the warm side towards the cold side.

Uncover from the White Sea that currently morphed us into one.

Listen for signs of life.

Escape.

I closed my eyes falling victim to the lullaby that seeped out of the ducts in the walls and tried forcing myself awake with the dark thoughts. After a few minutes of heavy breathing from the other half of my new self, I separated from her, flawlessly.

Walking into the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator to find anything to heat up in what was still a screen for the projected light that had originally brought me out of bed. I had no real goal in mind. I had no real goal at all today, or as of late. The fact that no one joined me to celebrate was not surprising. It was self-imposed. I had never made a big deal about things, and never gotten close to anyone specifically. My friends were of the general sense, and I liked it that way. More freedom.

I grabbed the first thing I saw, ignoring a still-warm cardboard box, and sat down with a small bag of half-eaten carrots interrupting the silence with a loud crunch. Though I was comfortable, it sounded loud enough to wake her so I moved further outside to save anonymity.

Looking out over the balcony, there was nothing familiar but the Brilliant Light still dancing. I stared intensely, unaware that I was devouring the last bits of the cold cylindrical getaways, soon feeling only plastic that drooled with condensation. The time apart from her that was still considered justifiable had depleted.

I headed back to the room and stopped in the doorway to find her in the same place I had left her, unmoved by my absence. I figured if she was concerned about my presence she would have been conscious of my escape. She would have followed me out. Naked in the

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shade of the night, whispering to come back, I would have picked her up by her skin and returned her to our mutual, unloving dance. She would have fallen in love with the idea and I would have fallen out of consciousness which I realized after hearing myself say aloud was a ridiculous and frightening regression to my naive views on feelings in the years preceding any real relationship or at least an attempt to make something work between two people for long enough to feel normal and spent the following moments recalling what drinks I had been fed that night. Retreating back to the kitchen to gather my things and my thoughts, I left her asleep to follow the Brilliant Light.

Outside the air was much colder on the right side of my body. A reminder of what was left inside. I couldn’t fully assess whether or not it was a mistake to leave, but I had developed a personal, physical measurement of the magnitude of my mistakes a long time ago: my chest.

The left side of my body was a barometer of situations. Tightening, thickening, twitching, numbing when my brain could no longer handle the anxiety of my most recent decisions or the recounting of those not so recent. As the door shut behind me, I found my trunk compressed between the night’s air and the finality of the turn and click of the lock. I had confiscated the keys from the ceramic bowl glazed in maroon-speckled desert-sand she had set them in when we first entered. It wasn’t impressive though I pretended it was as she later told me that most of the things in the house similar to the bowl were of her own works. “An old soul” of course “born in the wrong time”.

I rounded the corner to the side of the complex facing the Light, but did not make it far before standing paralyzed by the reality of the situation now seeing the Light for what it was. An unknown calling to an unknown place; a complete and curious unknown. Not like a piece of art—abstract in form and reason. Like a murdered man, still for the moment before the weight of gravity pulls him under.

The Light oscillated in the sky, turning over itself in a choreographed motion. It was looming, ominous and bright. The colors were vibrant, and as I would soon learn, ironic. I stepped forward.

Lifting, moving, placing

my feet, reciting what I had once read in a self-help pamphlet on meditation while waiting for a doctor that my parents had paid for to tell me that I wasn’t thinking clearly like I was unaware. Amitriptyline was the only “cure” I received—telling myself that it was just a placebo. The only downfall of a placebo is thinking you’re aware that it is the placebo effect and the pretentiousness of thinking you can detect a placebo. I threw the bottle away.

As I narrated the movement aloud, I felt a strange displacement hearing the words echo inside my head. The second time I had spoken aloud tonight which still seemed out of character, but so was leaving an unclothed stranger in bed.

I don’t know how long it really took me to get there. I was preoccupied in a bipolar way:

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switching from calmly reciting the movement of each step, to a bombardment of frantic thoughts replaying everything that had happened in the most recent hours. The grass that I was walking on was tough and stunted and barely reached above the worn soles of my shoes.

The sound from the bending of blades beneath me made it difficult to focus on any progress.

Each step was different. A rippling landscape was the only thing between myself and the mystery ahead. The hard grass turned to cracked earth, like lips laying out in the sun. I didn’t know how I had wandered this far off course—though it had then occurred to me that there was no course—but the shame of my leave had the final say in whether or not I would turn around.

An emergence of a shape ahead forced an exhilarating inquisitiveness to take over my body like a boy in line with his mother at the supermarket blindly feeling the packs of cards to see if any remnants of jersey not actually worn by anyone was inside. The light was now masked by a structure as I approached the backside of a building. It was rusticated. The stones reached for a companion like they had been ignored, forever in the dark shadow of the light shining oppositely itself.

There was nothing behind me. Her apartment had disappeared and the stone barrier that stood before me was the only thing stretching out to either side of myself, like a neon Great Wall, bending as it stretched into nowhere. It wasn’t as awkward as it should have been that we retired to her place and not mine. Let me explain: She told me that she was working on a novel two fifths of the way through the first conversation, and then invited me home to see what she had been working on after I revealed that I had minored in creative writing in college three fourths of the way through the second conversation—the gap in conversation was due to a long line at the bar, and then subsequently losing her momentarily to a guy wearing more jewelry than her that elicited an Emoji-like glance as he took a drink insinuating that I pretend to be her gay friend for enough time to “take her to the ladies room” which happened to be the other corner of the bar—and so we left for home to read something more or less about a misunderstanding between a boy and a girl, but only made it far enough to show me her bedroom—all pieces to a very banal night.

Now I was completely alone in a silent scene hovering before what seemed fated. I ran my fingers across the stone. The darkness made it easier to imagine myself removed. I opened my eyes to a door just as dark as the wall, and felt for a handle, but as I applied pressure, the door caved in on itself and emitted a bright light. This light was truly brilliant, ethereal.

I followed the light as cautiously as I had left the Stranger’s room. The first thing I noticed was the abundance of people, all wearing hand-made masks and dancing to music without words. I had one foot in the door, and one still in the night. Ungrasping the handle I entered completely into the bright space, and shut the door behind me. I thought I was quiet in my movements, but as the door was back in its place, the room fell silent. I froze realizing what I’d done in a panic. I left a perfectly good Stranger alone without word of leaving to explore this hostile light. Was I hallucinating? Had she put something in my drink? Had I taken something in my haze of intoxication (it would not be the first time)?

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But in the process of leaving, an eerily robotic return of conversation erupted in tandem, all on cue of my choice to retreat, as if there was never an interruption.

I did not feel human.

The only eyes that did not leave my body were the ones behind the bar. I looked away, confused on how to feel. When I returned my eyes to the bar, I saw one of the shadowy figures nod its head in my direction. I attempted to judge sexual orientation purely on shape and stance, watching how it held its own arms—dipping one shoulder slightly and showing a reciprocated tilt in its head—but never felt fair in my assessment and never fell on a concrete decision of what it was. The other figure poured something into a deep glass and headed my way. The mask that covered its face introduced a nose that was long and undulating. It erased the space between the Figure and myself as it moved towards me with the foaming glass that was full of a liquid I did not recognize. Not a normal gold or amber. The unidentifiable substance spilled with each step, and left clear, amethyst marks on the ground. The Figure was close, and I could see nothing but the mask on its face and the manganese outline of its body.

The bone structure was unique and exaggerated. An accentuated blue teased the exterior of its disguise. The eyes were real. Dark, but inviting, its deep irises spun in a clockwise motion magnetic to the bodies in the surrounding space.

The Figure’s arm lifted above my head to pour the purple matter from the glass to my tongue, then my cheeks, then my lips. It was chilling to my bones and released the pressure on the left side of me that had been present from the time I entered the night. A reversal of the Crucible in which a bystander runs to remove the stones instead of throwing his weight.

The solution breathed for me, a cold inhalation that I felt throughout my veins like the time I was sent to the hospital to save myself from blindness. It wasn’t serious enough to bring up in conversation, but left a scar that was impossible not to talk about. In the time between admittance and the surgery, I experienced saline. It did nothing more than allow me to feel.

I closed my eyes and imagined it running from the shining vestibule in my arm until deadending at my fingertips and my toes. But I was trapped then. Confined to a rough bed, in a monotonous room.

I was free now, in an airy space full of color. This time the solution that flooded my veins did not stop at my fingertips. It returned to my head, and back again. It swam laps through my limbs. It made itself familiar with every synapse, overpowering my senses, and I was somehow controlled. I felt everything. I saw everything. Motionless. Vivid.

They told me this would be euphoric, but in turn I felt only objectiveness. Only the space that I fell into, and the people that carried on harshly with their conversations. Only the echoing of pasts reworked for self-torture. Only a place filled with people I knew were rejecting my existence. Rejecting the event that had just taken place. Rejecting me explicitly.

Only the laughs felt on my skin, but never in my direction because I did not exist. It was

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difficult to pinpoint the mood. It was confusing altogether, and worst of all I was unsure how long this feeling would last.

The tall ceiling dwarfed me completely. Curved in a dome-like manner, a Whispering Gallery took shape. Its height turned the colors’ glow into a cold reflection. The walls stood straight and unconnected to its content made up of an eggshell stone stretching from my toes to the edges of the walls. A house for anyone and anything nonspecific to the people inside. It gave a rich appearance with long staircases retreating high enough to turn the party-goers into figurines. They descended the massive steps periodically from tours that everyone seemed to be giving while falling in and out of balance. It was never at any point apparent whether or not the owner was present, or if anyone was having a good time, and I’m still convinced that this ambiguity was not due to the masks that plagued the Gallery but something bigger.

The wide and rounded tables were separated far from each other, more like tiny event spaces rather than a congregation, and only set for two. Everything began to seem so similar in its suggestion of separation. Each person: an island.

I wiped the corners of my mouth dry and returned my eyes to the Figure in front of me who said nothing only inhaling and exhaling repeatedly. After moments of silent breathly exchanges, it looked back behind the bar to its counterpart to receive another gesture of approval.

A mixture of confusion and fear and exhaustion all combined to produce a glare that I was sure would be returned with a sympathetic re-gifting of amethyst, but as I turned away to watch the room, the drink disappeared. The room grew bigger, and I grew smaller.

Conversations increased in volume and invaded my ears. I could hear them all at once, and separately. The voices were monotonous, and unforgiving. Shouting things at each other that had nothing to do with the opposition’s previous discourse. All of it so disjointed, as if no one was really listening and as if the conversations were an outlet of transient thoughts with no real substance. No real intent of resolution for themselves or one another, but I still could feel nothing more than an objectiveness to the room, so I stood pleased that the liquid continued to overflow my veins and had not yet been completely dissolved by my insides.

I returned my attention to the Figure as it gently interlocked its fingers in mine never finishing on a final form; tracing mine with its own and pulling me in a certain direction.

We weaved through tables to the opposite exit where a parallel street flooded with people.

The Figure was swift and elegant in its movement. Dancing around the ignorance of the conversations. Above them. Surrendering to substance and direction in a room that was unforgiving, The Figure pulled me tighter as we approached the street. I looked back into the dim, colorful room as the mixture of lights came together in a new and warm grapefruit tint that coaxed my return. The conversations turned back to whispers, and I was comfortable with the room. I wanted to go back to the crowd I recognized forgetting its true nature where the ceiling lifted, but the Figure tilted its head at me concerned for my longing. Showing me its eyes for the last time, it motioned outside to the sea of familiarity and I obediently stepped back into the cool night with closed eyes shielding me from the neon signs. ___

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“You know I don’t like crowds,” she reminded me as we pushed through drunken kids and even drunker adults.

“Well sometimes you have to do things that you don’t like to do to get over them, and I told you to use the restroom before we got to our spots, and it was your idea to chug the rest of that water at the door. I actually just read…” she cut me off to explain that it was too loud and she was too fucked up to listen to me recite another study I inaccurately recalled from scrolling through a partial article on my way to work one morning.

“We’re going to miss our song,” she pouted in a way that was not annoying but endearing and slightly sexual. I bought tickets to see a band cover Donnie and Joe Emerson’s Baby and the realization that we might miss it was upsetting since neither of us really liked the rest of their music.

We made it back to our standing-room-only spots that had somehow waited for us— though they were five rows removed from their original location—to see the latter half of the song. With one of my fingers wrapped loosely around one of hers, I swayed to the rhythm of echoed distortion worrying about the people standing too close to me in every direction and closed my eyes to imagine what the lights would be from if they were not from filtered bulbs. Between the image of us and the color bouncing off of my eyelids, I felt a stillness in the moving crowd and started to wonder how long it would be before I had to open my eyes again. ___ With the freshness back against my skin, I opened my eyes to a street conquered by two-story, traditional homes turned from domestic vacationers to commercial traps. The street bent in a crescent shape, and the angle blocked the view of what lay beyond. The people that surrounded me were illuminated azure from the Brilliant Light, but this time from an energetic, enigmatic space. All types of people circulated through the double-door that divided into multiple layers to separate its contents. A man stood outside wearing a hat tilted to shade his eyes leaving just enough room for his voice to project words in a language I recognized from grade school:

Ressentir de l’amour comment il a été fait à se faire sentir!

Unfortunately I only knew how to understand words like bed, car, and kitchen, and the only pay-off of this schooling was that I knew that I would not be walking into a B&B which was reassuring. But it was the fact that the words hung in the night so romantically that abolished who this man at first appeared to be.

A rectangle covered the otherwise brick facade and framed two doors tinted so dark that I could not see the aggressive colors that threw themselves at the street until they were unleashed by those entering and exiting. The man’s presence was the only thing that seemed

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real and his words pushed me inside to discover if the entrails of this Golden Complex had any sort of hint at translation.

Rounding corners, left then right then left again, I was spit out into a gradual descent.

Thinking back to the masquerade in the Gallery, I tried not to convey such indifference in my movement. I stepped into a pit of soft seats shaped like right angles and half-circles. Bright gold hung from the ceiling, and a red light reflected off of the sheets creating streams of amber. The color deepened as it approached so close to my body that I could see the frayed edges from overuse.

Dum…………..Dum……………………………Dum…………………………….Tick (Repeat)

Simplistic and lacking melody, the Dancing Fur was entrancing in its repetition. I lusted for the apparition—not really the pigment that gave it its gravity but more so its hidden shadow. The flashing wall outside was unattainable and returning to the street was irrational.

I was slipping deeper into the semi-circle and further from the shining karats, but I could not see the depth in which I had fallen. My eyes were transfixed. I was running in a forest on fire. It enveloped my body, but emitted no smoke, just an intense pallet of warmth. This fire was constructive—creating monumental structures, permeable and safe. The Fur became something to hide me from the glares in the adjacent Gallery. It became a resurrection of the amethyst liquid. A place for a better self; one that would not have left tonight.

The dance continued. Sometimes touching my skin, sometimes falling away. But with each movement the color became precipitously lackluster. The fire was turning to ash with every back and forth of its body so I peeled away from the sunken position to search for a suggestion of something better. ___ “Oh, I know! Let’s play a game,” she shouted with excitement as she often did after solving algebraic math in year two of college.

I hesitated with a disgust not towards her or her elementary suggestion, but towards the weather that kept us hostage in this god-forsaken apartment. There was mold everywhere, the stench of something that would never be explained to us was trapped in the air and eventually became unnoticeable which was almost more unnerving than the reason for its unknown existence, and the tenants were unpleasant.

“Define game,” I never let her win, and she was competitive but cognizant that my level of competitiveness was tenfold which I would later come to realize was worthless in most cases.

“Well, we can play, like, monopoly, or something,” which was the wrong game to suggest because last time we played that the fake money ended up conjuring a discussion on real money and though we had both started on our own strategies—she would go for the

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large properties and electrical companies, I would buy out multiple small properties knowing that she wouldn’t be able to resist trading after her first failed attempts at acquiring Marvin Gardens—no one ever made it to monopolizing anything.

She realized after her suggestion that maybe it was best that we didn’t play a game. She slumped both shoulders forward and continued staring out the window to make it look like she was thinking of another option to take advantage of the rain when really we were both trying to figure out when games became more about other things than a chance to forget about other things. ___ I stood up too quickly and the room turned to spots of black. Shutting my eyes, I waited to be reintroduced to the dysthymia I had met years ago. After experiencing the break of this black cloud, I could not stand back underneath it accepting its daunting shade. Desperate to avoid the return of this feeling, I clawed at the layers of hysterically Dancing Fur. As soon as I hit the street, the doors closed, the bright bulbs shut off, and a man argued for more.

“I’ll pay double,” he pleaded, pushing his way back to the doors.

Absoluteness.

Everything moved quickly as the lust of each building maintained its own gravity.

Hoping to find my way back, I continued in the current and tried to find the next source of the Brilliant Light.

All of the buildings seemed similar, and disinterested. They were typical in form and tried hard to identify themselves. I passed a building with a cream facade that wore maroon frames and sea-foam shutters. People hung out of the open windows wearing disgusted faces. They trumped me in elevation, but nothing else, and held glasses with foaming liquids. Obvious that the interior was just a reflection of the exterior, I avoided the entrance, but the facades held my attention long enough for me to trip over feet stretching from the curb in front of me. A woman with a crude face drowning in layers of old clothes reached up to me with a dying hand to reveal her palm. It was much lighter than the rest of her, flush and wrinkled like the plains that transported me here. She held a pyramid of tan crystals, suspending it there waiting for me to act in some way as if she was attempting to monetize the tiny particles. After seconds of confusion her grip fell and let the sand-ish collection spill at my feet. Not even the beggars knew what they wanted here.

From the tan rocks, I saw a glimmer around the bend of the crescent—a red stone pathway that split the reflection of a white stone light high above our Earth. It was a guide for the water, and anything else that decided to use it as that. I concluded that this is where the crescent came to its end. I hesitated, tired of discovering, but was pulled by the gravity of the white circle not yet fully lit.

My mind was worn. I gave up on the night the same way the buildings around me had.

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The brilliancy was fading and the colors were no longer dancing, but flickering exhausted and irritated. Everything had lost its glimmer as quickly as it came. I was tired of the constant movement. I was tired of being tossed from one paradisiac illusion to another, so I stepped out on the rose-colored stone to head back to the Stranger. At the mercy of its pull, now all which lay in front of me was the cold, white light.

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LONELINESS APATHY LOVE REGRET FEAR AWE

L O N E L I N E S S

S

Colors hid under industrial shadows.

A world awaiting their return.

If there was ever a time I saw a frozen shade, it was in the aftermath of a scalding light.

This is me: In Apathy

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In A Desolate Channel Amidst God Himself The rocks led me further into the moon, but had turned from a natural pattern of sediment into a man-made wall of square-cut tiles. The stone was thrown in an unorganized way.

Each one had its own mechanical marking and gave the collection a confusing relationship.

I slipped around the green slime that accumulated from the water’s touch. Occasionally the waves crashed hard against the face of the stone, but for the most part they lapped predictably around me, never attempting to reach for me. Aware that I was among them, but disinterested.

The algae continued to challenge my footing, and an outline of a human emerged from the mist—the light of the moon rendering him a shadow. He cast out into the waves and said nothing and did nothing as I passed. The sign of people meant I was close to something.

Hopeful, I sped up to find it.

My feet sunk into the earth as I landed on a beach filled with a sand much like what wrapped the bowl that housed the keys to the Stranger’s home. The land was new, but the fog remained, and the haziness of the air dampened my emotions. The intensity of the Brilliant Light made this sky even grayer.

Lost in the clouded air, the freedom I had always searched for was now a hindrance.

The lack of color and excitement pushed me in a random way. My feet moved forward with no intent and I decided that I would walk until I breached the mist or fell into the ocean.

Lifting, moving, placing

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I stepped off of a warped wood floor and back into the sand. Heading in the same direction, I followed along a twisted arrangement of unequally spaced trash cans not holding any of the bottles or emptied bags wrestling with the tide. Six barrels went by before I saw anything new.

In a much dimmer light, rocks recollected in the same manner as before. They took form in an untraditional way that acted as a division between public and private, inhaling and exhaling boats on one side, and defending them from waves on the other.

Hundreds of feet beyond the bend that had consumed a passing vessel, I saw a mechanical plant of sorts. It was futuristic and sublime with a central machine stretching forever into the sky balancing on shining slender legs. This silvery contrivance was ambiguous in its purpose and surrounded by a multitude of other engines, skinny and pointed in the same direction.

It was not made for beauty. Awkward and lanky, it stood solely for efficiency. The spotlights in the compound highlighted the pragmatism and I felt a vague fear of the grandness and mysteriousness that towered above. ___ “…and then everything just stopped. It was so odd. And then there I was standing in the middle of a dessert amongst sand that was the color of clay, and a sky that was unworldly.

An aqua blue spectrum shot up aggressively into space from the horizon, quickly turning to black. There was no one around me. Not even the ground joined me as it lay completely flat, hiding from what I held. In my hand was a small string. The string was typical of string that would hold a kite, and stretched upwards without slack. My eyes followed the string to find it attached to a large, beast-like metal machine. It was round and intricate. The exterior looked like a metallic brain. It twisted and turned with valves and various parts. It was malevolent, and swaying unhurriedly thousands of feet above me. I stared at it with a keen fear. I couldn’t release it because I was unsure where it would go. The control of this creature was almost calming. The silence, deafening. Except for the distant hum of the machine. There was something off about the distant hum of the machine. But I couldn’t look away. And then that’s when I woke up,” I was facing her but not looking at her. I was looking at the ground from the corner of my eyes with glazed sight as I re-imagined the scene.

“It’s like you forget I’m here when you tell me about your dreams, or about anything really. And I don’t know why you have to move around so much when you describe them, or use your hands like that. You’re going to hit me one of these times and then I’ll find it’s too dangerous to listen and you’ll just have to go back to telling that tiny notebook about them, so choose your mannerisms wisely,” she informed me with her chin half in her palm supported by fingers that distorted her cheek and squinted her eye.

“You’re just jealous that you can’t dream like me,” I joked as I pounded my chest and made a face like I had just dunked on her.

“Okay, we’ve been over this. Don’t hold my dream deficiency against me. I mean, maybe I do I just never remember them when I wake up. Plus, I don’t think I need to dream.”

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“Why not...”

“You dream enough for the both of us.” ___ The Arachnid Compound was a seemingly unreachable beacon over the Desolate Channel that separated the two landmasses. I decided to continue along the water in hopes of reaching the shining machines. A trail started to curl away from the water towards a field metal boxes. On the sand were scattered rectangular homes, sometimes stacked on top of one another with rusted ladders leaning against the sides as a means of entrance. Most of the homes were similar with the exception of minor changes, and the placement of each unit was irrelevant as if a freight had hit land and spilled its contents without say in the direction.

The sand gradually turned into grass inside the field to offer lawns that were neatly trimmed in some areas, and overgrowing up the sides of the corrugated siding in others. The place looked deserted, and the people outside told a similar story. A man and a woman noticed me as I passed, but did not acknowledge me. The man was leaning against the side of his crate smoking a cigarette, and the woman was sitting in the tall grass in front of him looking at nothing. Her face was stoic and only visible by the light of the lantern that hung from a nail on the front of the crate above where the man was leaning. He was hard to make out from the smoke and the surge of light reflecting in a halo around him. I could see the outline of him next to an address of jumbled numbers marking a certain territory. I stopped in front of the home to study the structures, but mostly to try and get an answer as to why I was here, but the woman was already saying something that attempted to explain her neurosis. As I got closer I could hear that her explanation was in the form of a recitation of poetry as she rocked gracelessly and stumbled over the words in a reciprocated manner.

“Such a…a such a dry brain in the reason… season. Dry Brain, Dry….. Season” The man looked at me shaking in a different way saying that “She’s gone insane”. He was calm though he picked at the last of his fingernails, leaving trails of blood down his knuckles.

To my right was a room that had shades partially drawn. The rectangular opening shown blue. It never made sense to me why it was always blue. The television always made the color blue. Maybe it’s the depressive thought of sitting in a box, looking at a box, and not thinking about anything. Or maybe it’s not depressing. Maybe it’s a better way of living and it’s the color of my jealousy—How I could never quit my brain long enough to hear what the people in the box were saying and too disinterested to rewind. The blueness flickered off my skin, and I stepped further out of the light to disappear.

To my left, over the cloud of smoke, was a large man with no head towering thirty feet above the Crates. His neck was the only thing visible dimly lit by lights on the ground. I looked back at the couple once more, and made my way towards the headless man. Moving through the field, the man seem to grow. His arms stretched out between the Crates and the Desolate Channel inviting me closer. A phrase in Spanish read something about the statue being a guardian over the fisherman that sailed from the Desolate Channel, and a remembrance of those who were not lucky enough to return. The copper was tarnished and

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turning. Broken necklaces and fake flowers were thrown across the base of the Holy Statue.

A string of beads suspended a scene involving the same man that stood before me, but the picture had worn from the weather and lost its beauty. The solemnity of the field’s inhabitants implied that this man was no savior.

I was taken from the path back to the water’s edge to watch colorfully scaled creatures thrown into white painter’s buckets. I wondered if they were being done a favor by reuniting them with old friends that had swam astray in the strength of a new current. A funeral in a sense. They were going to die soon anyway. Now they could pay their respects. It was a gift really.

A glowing thing in the distance stood tall in the sky symmetrically splitting smaller lights. An old quarry surrounded the metal beast littered with interesting trees. The forest was sparse. Trees and shrubs grew in no relation. Everything was small, sometimes ornamented with leaves, sometimes with flowers, but for the most part with nothing. I could grab the tops of almost all of it.

The shrubs were trees, the ponds were oceans, and the tadpoles that swam within them were whales with peculiar fins. The trees were unique—bare at the bottom drawing my attention upwards as if they were politely asking me to notice them. Or maybe they were afraid of me. Out of the litter of stunted foliage one tree bent and stretched away from the rest in the most magnificent cantilever. I reached out to its trunk to bend the scaly bark and traced around the particles that curled off of the base in an infinitesimal loop. ___ “Stooooooooooooooop,” she was laughing uncontrollably now and insinuating uncomfortableness with her oscillations but proved her secureness by keeping her arm in my loose possession as I ran my index finger along one of the few veins visible in her forearm.

I could feel the sensation—a phantom feeling—but I was not moving like she was. I was in control of the degree to which the sensation was impressed. It was a falsifying authorship of power and something I often couldn’t get out of my head—the tingling of control. Periodically returning to my skin, but never taking me by surprise. Like the smooth return of air after a long wait under water. Or like acid that stays waiting in the spine. I can’t remember if I ever stopped touching her arm. ___ I drew my hand away from the flaking trunk to watch an inlet from the ocean that wound through the quarry bend around the blasted rocks. It poured out of a cement cylinder the same way sewage would and robbed the stream of its grace. It was the kind of water that would support a sleuth of bears with its upward-swimming salmon. I tried to picture myself as a grizzly stepping into the water, but the only thing to claw at was a plastic bottle sticking on something under the water that had turned clear blue from the minerals. I made the same wake my hand used to when I would spin around dizzily in the lake and I watched the bottle shake violently from the force of the water but only focused on the trail it left behind.

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The dregs that reached through the ground were misshapen and uncomfortable. It made it difficult to move through to the machines. They appeared to be working, but left for dead after the surrounding land was exhausted. Sitting patiently waiting for their next orders unaware that no one would ever come back for them but anticipating revitalization, they insisted on a continuous drone.

Before I knew it, I was tangled in unorganized wires and circuits. I hurtled my way deeper into the system to explore the body of the beast finding myself underneath the abdomen splitting the spinnerets that faced back to the water. The legs of the machine cascaded around me in a tunnel of vision out to the channel. A latter was attached to the cephalothorax.

I climbed up the rungs with caution, hesitant of what could be inside and pushing out thoughts of what I imagined it to be. Assuming the machine to be stuffed with cords hanging like vines from all angles of the cavernous shell, at one point on my ascent I imagined the machine taking flight and forever holding me captive of a foreign species on my way to a planet that researchers would soon discover and ignorantly dispute over its identity being that of “moon or planet?” but land on a clear understanding that life did not exist either way.

Contrary to the former and the latter as I pulled my weight onto the cold floor of the skull I found only an empty grotto. The space was not filled with oozing butter-like cerebral matter, but in fact filled with nothing at all. No sign of cognitive behavior.

Though this grotto appeared to have no visibility to the outside, it framed a glimpse of the opposite landmass that I had walked here on through a panel that had been torn off by some outside force. Approaching the lookout, I started to make out one singular sign of life near the water whom I was not prepared to come into contact with after the Crate People. ___ “Let me see,” anxiously pushing me aside she stuck her eyes on the metal that was much colder than the air around us and steered the pareidoliac viewer in a clumsy swivel. Bored of watching her watch other things I displaced myself ten feet below by means of a meandering path created by feet over time that eventually wrapped back underneath her. In between the path and the precipice where she stood was a small pond that I sprinkled pieces of dead grass into while waiting for a discovery from up above, watching the fish pry at the surface.

“Hey! Heeey! Come baaack,” she yelled. I didn’t want to leave. They couldn’t have enjoyed the taste of the grass but I enjoyed their company.

“Aliens,” I asked out of breath.

“This guy is, like, doing yoga, but, like, not,” definitely aliens.

“Or maybe he’s just bad at yoga,” I rebutted using my face to push hers out of the way so I could see this ‘human’ she was talking about. She pointed in a certain direction towards the man uselessly as I was looking through two magnified tubes that warped the otherwise common datum. The tubes eventually fell on a man gyrating in multiple directions at once, maybe an evolution of hot yoga where the yogaer(sp.?) goes wild from the heat. Soothing, emancipating, absolutely worth the money the Internet would read. Saved my marriage another

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blogger would write. “Yeah, just really bad at yoga,” I confirmed.

“Does he still look like he’s, ya know,” she asked with a look that said I hope you didn’t have to see what I just saw but also I kind of hope you did.

“Like he’s what...”

“Like he’s fucking someone that doesn’t exist.”

“I hope that’s not what I look like when...”

“No. At least I don’t think so. God, I hope not...”

That was the thing about magnification or really any altered view. There was never any sureness about the relativity between eyes. I watched the man for a few seconds longer not really watching him, but thinking about what she saw when she looked at me, and what I saw when I looked at her.

“This place is beautiful, but I feel like it would be different alone,” she noticed, and I didn’t ask if she thought it would be better or worse without me because I knew her answer would be something like: just different. ___ I spent less time inside the hollow skull than anticipated due to the cave’s lack of substance and apparent and distant calling from the new land in front of me and climbed down the ladder to the shadowy center of the Compound. Hurtling over the rest of the circuitry, I reached the opposite side of the fence and scaled the diamond-woven wire to fall back into the sand. The reintroduction of this ground was now a choral refuge from the dispirited structures scattering the grayscale that was sadly becoming ordinary.

This place was far from the Light, but I appreciated it for its avoidance of falsities. It was simple, unstressed.

The quarry’s trees were livelier on this side and offered fresher oxygen for a return of my services. This was one of the few symbiotic relationships I had ever found myself in. It was a bit of a burden to support myself in confidence that these trees would do the same and that would be the extent of our relationship. There were no ideas that needed to be laid out, or conversations on views of love and death, and no pretenses of places traveled and feelings felt. Alongside of these arborous structures I was dependent only physically. I wondered if they saw me as beautiful as I saw them, and then remembered that it didn’t matter.

The sign of life I saw from the machine was inattentively rearranging the world, picking stems from the grass and throwing stones from the shore into the Desolate Channel unsuccessfully gliding them across the surface only once, maybe twice if the waves calmed.

I did the same much more skillfully in hopes that She would notice and say something so I could see what she looked like when She squared up to me. After multiple tosses that warranted Her attention but never received it, I gave up and moved closer.

Noticing my approach, She turned with direction somewhere opposite of me but

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not hurriedly like She was trying to escape, but like She was gauging my intentions. With each step that I took She took two which put me an even distance behind Her. I turned my attention back to the remaining outskirts of the Desolate Channel from the unsureness of where we were going, and found a change in scenery. The fog had become stronger, hiding most of the elements I previously traveled through. The Holy Statue was still ignored by the field’s walkers and the Arachnid Compound was no longer shining from the spotlight, but colored like an over-ripe clementine from the reflection of the emerging sun that worked to eradicate the remaining monuments.

Past Her body that now disappeared like the man smoking under the lamplight was a shimmering brightness located much higher than myself. It was a sunburst refracted through a geodesic dome. Wherever we were headed had the chance of never spitting me back out.

I thought about the Stranger in my bed, and how dangerous it would be if the light over her shoulder was never turned off.

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It ran like the remnants of apples, spilling down the arms of its devourer.

Sticking to new hairs, ignored for its richness.

This is me: In Love

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Quarantined in a Translucent Island’s Web of Intricacies The two of us walked in a direction that only She was aware of. We still paralleled the shore, but the fog had cleared and gave light to the furthest point of the channel. The sand curled around a loose corner like it had secretly seceded from the circular mound ahead afraid of what the now secluded landmass would think of it after it found out that it had left. Cowardly, it appeared to leave us stranded from our assumed destination until we continued around the bend into a perfectly straight bridge made of heavy stone spanning from us to the island.

I took my first step over the water keeping the same pace behind and kept silent as a result of both observing the surroundings in case I had to retrace my steps and because the rising sun sat in the sky frozen in its low position and so purely reflected the clementine color on everything around us making the world seem as though it was being viewed through a pair of discolored baseball lenses that trapped me in nostalgia. The trees were a deep violet and the water was a clear lemon and Her body was still an invisible silhouette. I ducked my head behind Her as a shade from the sunlight. It gave me enough time to see that the Island was both closer and smaller than I had anticipated.

I stepped down into familiar sand that sunk deeper than before. We stood side by side looking up at the massive glass semi-circle that capped a serious structure pushing the boundaries of the Island. She reached into Her pocket to retrieve a key that unlocked the wall between us and the structure. I watched it turn and click to reveal a foreign interior where the structure waited, while Dante interrupted the tranquility: And so my mind, held high above itself, looked on intent and still, in wondering awe

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As we stepped inside we were no longer subject to the color of the sky or anything else in the world. The temperature was cool despite the absence of a breeze and the water that surrounded the dome invisible.

She locked the door behind Her. Opaqueness plagued the interior and cast blank white sheets over everything except for the house in the center. It was iridescent and changed its tone as we changed positions. It was like nothing I had ever seen—aesthetically magnetic, forcing my eyes in multiple directions though somewhat symmetric at its origin. I was entranced by the effect of movement the colors had on the facade. It was intoxicating in a sobering way.

The sheet-like plains that extended for a short distance before gliding up the side of the dome formed a continuous canvas on which this structure was painted, as was She. I looked to my left and saw Her looking around as if She was also seeing it for the first time, but with much less reverence than my face admitted.

Most of the structure was hidden by the grand entrance and piloti that lofted above our heads a modern square room to keep it from any threat of water. It was the first of what seemed like many geometric spaces we would occupy.

The entrance was pushed off-center rotated at the point of our location inviting us up a steady incline and through a vertical ingress. She led after a fluid motion of Her head implying a rhetorical Shall we? as if to indirectly express that the confidence and allure and all other attractive qualities that radiated from this question were the final seal that would press the warm crimson wax over what may lay hidden in the depths of all of this and keep it there. Either that or its antithesis: the saliva-activated semi-permanent glue that failed at a child’s pry. Whichever it was, I was sure I would soon find out.

We lifted off of the world traversing the gradual slope of the canvas around the evenly spaced pillars to a room perfectly symmetric to every axis and containing a small amount of decoration. A picture of Her two sisters, Her mother, and Herself greeted me as we entered.

She sat down the key and a few shells She borrowed from the beach. Her explanation of the picture’s placement would more than likely be cliché containing the following in no particular order: • After college we stopped seeing each other • She remarried / I moved away • She was my best friend growing up • She understood me • No one else understood me • I know this sounds cliché, but

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Something like that. And maybe continue on in the particular order of:

Anyway, I got this place on my own after school taught me how to deal with others’ money—She would explain that She graduated Business in general because She was driven and good with people, but that She also contemplated skipping it altogether and joining the military because She was practical—and subsequently my own money along with learning that I wanted to be by myself for a while and maybe forever just waiting for a new kind of artificial insemination where I wouldn’t really have to do anything other than wait for a child to be dropped in my arms, but not via stork because I’m deathly afraid of birds.

I would shake my head not only out of politeness, but like I was processing, storing the new information in files that when shaking my head later in confirmation that I had remembered the data—though I wouldn’t—I could shake it back out.

She made a move into a large hall that was a short connection to the next room, but we found ourselves on a detour as She spun gracefully around the corner to the faucet adjacent to the island countertop that was a similar material to the bridge we had crossed here on.

The marbled deep grays reflected the overhead light in a random pattern. Everything around it was painted white over dark wooden floors. The only detail that stood out was a brushed metallic hood that indefinably reflected my face like the back of a spoon. I knew I was there, but I didn’t know how much of myself actually existed.

She held the glass close to Her mouth with a bent arm resting on the other that was casually crossed under Her breasts that I hadn’t noticed until now. I could feel Her watching me observing myself in the reflection. It was nice to be recognized after a night of no real interactions so I continued to look around selfishly at the same things I had already seen. It was the type of kitchen that would be imagined if asked to imagine a kitchen, but it was too big for one person. The island was too far from anything to pivot from counter to center and there were no pans that hung from the ceiling and no dishes to eat from and even if there were there were no cabinets to put the dishes in and there was no pantry and there was only a sink, an island, and a table with two chairs. ___ Everyone had left. There were bottles and glasses around at random points and lights on in various rooms. We both stood near the sink shoulder to shoulder. It was the first party we had thrown in her new place and it went surprisingly well. We were at a point in our lives when people casually carried joints and only drank wine—mostly red—and the music was not overbearing and it usually had words to it unless it didn’t which she liked more than I and everyone seemed to move and talk slower.

“That was fun,” she said with her head tilted against the corner of me. I could feel her weight pressing back and forth and decided that we both had had enough. The quietness in the room was almost tangible after hours of so many conversations amplified by the alcohol,

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and the room went from hot to cold instantly.

“Now what,” I asked feeling uneasy about the abrupt halt of the night.

“What, now that everyone’s gone and we’re alone and there’s no one here,” she replied rolling her head over to look up at me with wide eyes. ...

She was laying half on her side and half on her back not knowing how to make the kitchen table comfortable, and I was sitting in a wooden chair that pressed coldly against my bear skin and the silence was now a different kind of silence. An echoing silence from a tangling of breaths bouncing off of the walls. It seemed like this mixture of warm and cold always held the potential for a storm.

“Are you going to get that or am I because I’m pretty sure you’re going to get that,” she said into the ceiling still halfway on her back.

I gave the man two bills and returned to the table before he could return any of it. We ate the steaming triangles without plates partially because we didn’t want to leave the pizza alone and mostly because we didn’t have any but were careful not to let the slices touch the table where sweat was still outlined by a thin layer of bubbling condensation.

She finished more than I could and hopped off the surface towards one of the lighter rooms surrounding us, pushing her arms back through her colorless dress. Calling something out to her, she turned around to see me looking at remnants of her outfit still lying on the floor and then back at where they were supposed to be which she scoffed at and turned the gathering of objects into a chore of my own. Adding the pizza box to the refrigerator of random leftovers, I followed her in empty handed, and though the corner light was still lit, I couldn’t tell where she had gone. ___ The empty glass hit the counter with the same shrillness that glass always made when placed on a surface no matter the force applied and She disappeared again around a corner.

Back to the hall we zig-zagged into the living room. There was a TV, a record player, books and magazines, and more pictures. Her way of posing was becoming something I tried anticipating. This time She sat on the couch with Her back resting both on the arm and the cushion with Her left leg bent by Her chest over the other leg that was crossed underneath with Her right hand by Her mouth as if She had the glass back in Her possession or as if She was waiting to say something or as if She just formed habits. I looked around at the walls that had become slightly more transparent. We were no longer confined by four, but five as the hexagonal space closed around us in an intimate but still open manner. The walls remained white, but patterned with linear, arbitrary paint strokes to add a texture to the room when the light hit it just right.

I sat myself closer this time on the opposite side of the couch facing Her as casually as I could manage with my legs on the ground and my right arm across the back wrapping the

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emptiness between us. The couch was red, but not in a Velvet Underground type of way like the vinyls. I stood up almost immediately after situating myself because picking music to fill the air felt more comfortable than waiting for Her to choose words that would.

I placed the record on the spindle and fell eye level to the table to make sure the needle fell on the right line after reviewing the back cover of the album.

Backing away, I was pleased that Her avoidance of the remote control to the television was evidence that my choice of music took precedent over the color blue.

Now, there was nothing speaking except the black circle in front of us. The slanting rhythmic patterns were simple and careless like they hadn’t been written beforehand, but like they were thought of as they were being sung.

Dreams of you all the time, Feels so good I want to get that right Her books were not of any specific genre. More or less gifts from relatives or sudden impulses to re-evaluate and become a reader because things were getting stale. There were books that seemed to be assigned from school due to there being no other reason for their existence, books that were for people that wanted to help themselves, books that challenged the imagination, books that had pictures in them, and books that were collections of gerunds, clauses, phrases, and sometimes just words. Flipping to a page of an orange book covered with a black and white picture of a planet most likely taken by a robot, I skimmed five lines of a lonely page.

I sleep so you will be alive, It is that simple.

The dreams themselves are nothing.

They are the sickness you control, Nothing more.

I shut it tightly, and the record stopped.

Both of us now uncomfortable in our respective places, She retracted from Her position leaving all of the words still floating in space, and stood up to return to the hall which tightened gradually to a new dwelling. We passed a partly open door to what looked like the guest room. The room was darker than the others and the bed was unmade as if whomever stayed last purposefully left evidence of existence, and She hadn’t the courage to remind Herself. I didn’t ask questions and didn’t try to explore it any further as it was duller than the rest. We continued up the shift in elevation that was difficult to notice until looking behind.

The halls had nothing hung on them, but became more transparent from the outside light,

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sequestering then highlighting the compressing places that connected us to Her bedroom.

For once, there was nothing in the room to conjure conversation. We both stared at the ceiling not rushed by the silence, but embracing it.

The room spun. The bed was comfortable. It was a deeper red than the couch. A red that I recognized but couldn’t place and an idea that I didn’t rest on because She was getting closer. The walls grew darker, emitting no light into the room, the space between us decreased exponentially until we were no longer separate, and I could see into Her—almost through Her. ___ “OHMYGODNOWAYILOVETHATSHOWNOONEELSEEVERAGREES. Okay, have you seen the episode where they both…” a brunette went on about something that didn’t matter to a friend I had brought to see if all four of us were a match. Annoyed from exhaustion, I looked to my left to confirm that I wasn’t the only one feeling like this. She was sitting with both feet on the couch and her hand behind my head in a gentle stretch as I tried to slouch just enough to show how much I didn’t care without letting her know that I hated her friend. It was going well for the other two, and we both felt a since of pride that we had organized this whole thing. She was watching them as I had been and as she felt me look over she met my eyes with a sort of confidence in what we both felt deep inside.

Her irises were a deep gold and consumed by the black center that was reacting to the burst of light emerging above the clear distinction of earth and space and trying to swallow me whole simultaneously. In that moment of noticing I concluded the rest of her was not important. The way her eyes pierced through me. It was something that I knew I would not be able to recover from. In that moment of time when there was nothing else—no color, no sounds, no thoughts, no feelings, no past, no future, no right nor wrong—I realized that beauty does not lie in the eye of the beholder, but rather between the eyes of those who leave the world long enough to notice it. ___ The beauty of the home was beyond measure and reaching its zenith as I lost track of where I stopped and where She began. The heat was dizzying. The movements were fast. My hands were heavy. And everything became sweet. The sweetness that is felt everywhere but the tongue. The sweetness that congeals at the point of conjunction between the neck and shoulders. So sweet that the nerves in my body lunged at random to find its origin and learn it forever. A sweetness that can only be so sweet until the heat turns it to a syrupy mess that runs violently in every direction.

It started at my head, beading in paths around my eyes to my jawline and sprinting the length of my neck to the bend of my collarbone and the peak of my shoulders. Gaining a sort of potential energy as it grouped at these points, the growing weight of it tipped over the pools at their respective heights creating a river from my sternum to my nave. From my shoulder it raced around the mounds on my elbows all eventually collecting at my toes that opened up a hole in the floor wide enough for only one to fall through.

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I felt myself being pulled into a dark blue. It was a thick and unforgiving substance and it pulled at my entirety. I resisted for as long as I could, but it seemed the faster I moved, the quicker I fell. The room was now a plum-navy sea absent of any waves. I sank into the paste with Her close enough to taste though as I descended into this freakish consumption, she only watched me fall away.

With no force, it pulled my body deeper into the house. Floating, I could see nothing but the sun breaking in glimmering streaks that pointed me down a steep decline into somewhere that I could not yet see. Though I was still covered in the Dark Immersion the outside was almost completely transparent. To the center of the house I saw planes that started to give way to visibility of the contents within. I saw objects of color scattered through the space in layers like a Nesting Doll, but couldn’t make out their purpose.

The First Layer was empty as a rolling partition cut me away from the Immersion. A vertical bar of light was plastered to my left around a hall and as I turned in its direction, a larger than normal creature appeared on the directly in front of me. The distance between the walls was short and it only took me a few steps until I was close enough to see the eyes of this thing making note of me. As I drew my hand near its back to feel the round abdomen, it threw clear barbs in my direction and let out a quiet scream tilting its body parallel to the surface it was attached to.

I had never felt so threatened by something so harmless.

Feeling it watch me, I entered through the vertical bar of light.

The Second Layer was much brighter. The ground was littered with pieces of paper piled so high that all exits were blocked. I picked up the pieces to scan the subjects. The topics covered were mundane and lead nowhere, but there were patterns: dates, names, topics, lengths, handwriting, ink, vocabulary, spacing and non-spacing. I read every page, every word, and formed neat piles that accumulated rapidly. Though nothing in these letters had anything to do with myself, I was less concerned with their content and more concerned with their organization. I obsessively searched the lots looking for similarities; going to great lengths to make assumptions based on the smallest of details. I found things even in the way the paper was wrinkled from being pushed around. Dear separated from To and further sub-categorized by salutations of To the One, To the One I Loved, and To Whom it May Concern. Block Format separated from Modified Block Format. Legible from illegible. Long from short. After an unknown amount of time spent organizing the sheets, I looked up to find a new door once covered by the piles. Without hesitation, I abandoned the organization to make my way to the center, knocking over most of the piles on my way out. The time lost in the filing and unfiling was neglected by my overarching obsession to travel deeper into the core that sparkled from the glimpses of its contents as I waded in the Immersion.

The Third Layer was still inside‌ I realized as my foot came down on a ledge that extended only a few feet in front of me over the once-white planar surface we both stood on before entering. Now it showed evidence of the island where the grass stopped at the edge of the dome and the water continued. The

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sublimity that was present at the beginning was gone as I was spit out to a much different landscape. Its walls stretched the Island and there was no sign of possible re-entry. I took the staircase leading down the side of the house.

In front of myself now at ground level was a new bridge leading to a new place. The translucent walls revealed a landmass connecting to the bridge and further to the right was a path that led back around through a side we had not yet entered, but it was unreachable from my current position.

I thought of retrying the door to see if it hadn’t really locked me out, but the sight of the wall that separated myself from the inside paired with the thought of the Stranger still alone in my bed was enough to send me away. This Island wasn’t moving, and I knew my way back.

Stepping toward the glass I turned around once more to see Her standing in the window to the bedroom I left Her in before surrendering to the Immersion. I couldn’t make out much or Her—only the weight that seemed to be pressing down heavily on both of Her shoulders.

In turning the final door of the Islands glass shell, I felt liberated by the outside air, and though a part of me wanted to bear the weight that Her shoulders now carried, I embraced the lightness. The impulsive obsessions that came from within, the constant digging through room after room, the uncomfortableness of myself near Her, the awkwardness of things I didn’t want explained, the quickness I was dragged underneath, the darkness that covered everything so fully and so aggressively and how I felt so okay with it was all locked inside the translucent walls to wither and decay. The only things left were my thoughts challenging my choice in leaving, and an awful sound ahead.

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LONELINESS APATHY LOVE REGRET FEAR AWE LOVE

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My feet continued in the direction of time, my heart stayed back to hear itself beat, and my brain spilled out stretching the length of what stood between myself and any way out to be collected piece by piece.

This was me: In Regret

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Thru Constricitng Cycles in a Reflective Afternoon The sound remained a mystery as the bridge widened and grew at its edges. It blocked my ability to see out over the water, and I wasn’t sure if what was underneath me was land or sea or just space and even more unsure if the direction I was headed was forwards or backwards and if this was even still a bridge. The left turns seemed like right turns and the strobes of light that came from small openings in the sky made it seem as though I was skipping steps— blindly throwing me into new alleys. The lights increased in speed as the lengths of the alleys decreased. My chest pounded and rippled down the left side of my arm. The walls grew and my body shrank. The air thickened and my lungs tightened and my eyes widened and my chest beat at an exponential rate. ___ “Fade in. Interior Amusement Park, Day. Two people, a boy and a girl, no, a man and a girl, wait no that’s not okay, a man and a woman, one obviously more enamored than the other, that’s you, the one that’s more enamored, enter through two swinging gates to a crowd of people exposed to a land of opportunity,” I said as we entered through two swinging gates into a crowd of people exposing ourselves to a land of opportunity.

“I don’t think this is necessary to do every…” I cut her off to continue my vision.

“Pan to close up of boy… man, looking in awe of the towering machines that loop and turn from every direction hundreds of feet in the air. Foreigners pass by hurriedly on to the next foreign ride speaking their foreign languages. The man looking over at the woman begins to wonder if she is even listening to him,” I said as she studied a poorly drawn map

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with an excessive amount of color. I repeated the last line adding something about how she was ‘the worst’ to see if she was really listening but she continued to focus on the map so I tapped her shoulder twice and waited until she turned around not anticipating the frustration it would cause due to my apparent lack of concern for how “annoying” and “immature” I was which was unfair because we were at an amusement park.

“Fine, it’s the end of the world, people are raiding the streets, pillaging, murdering… what comes after murdering?” “ra...”

“Right, pillaging murdering ra… and you don’t have anything to defend yourself with.

Which way do you go? Where do you hide,” I asked trying to switch subjects without having to forfeit immaturity while still getting her to make up her mind on which way we headed first.

“Ummm…” it was apparent that she was interested in the question and was trying to envision the whole end of the world thing in her head before she made any rash directional decisions, but became too overwhelmed because like her inability to dream during the night, she couldn’t dream during the day. “I don’t know. Why are you always asking questions like this? Can’t we just eat churros and ride rides?”

I knew that the reason for my constant questioning centered around something that manifested from my obsession with control, but I wasn’t going to admit that because it made me sound controlling. And now standing in a crowd of people exposed to a land of opportunity, I needed a way to ease my anxiety about having to make the right decision based mostly on the Fun Potential : Travel Distance ratio so I often talked as though it was not myself that was making the decision, but as someone who had direction.

“I don’t know, but you are no fun,” I moved forward hoping that she had not heard my last comment but was too interested in the outcome of my decision to turn back to see. ___ Heading west I avoided the other two paths to my right and found myself winding in a space too dark to navigate. Feeling my way through, the only sound was my breath mixed with the shrill sound that I heard leaving the Island. I couldn’t tell if it was resulting from a reverberation off of the walls in front of me or behind me and soon found the answer as I hit a dead end. Exhaling I turned around and headed back to the center, but there was no longer a center. There was no starting spot. There was no entry or exit. There were only walls. These walls had no end and no ceiling. They stretched for miles under a stone plinth suspended above. I couldn’t tell if it was actually falling to crush me underneath or if it was the compression I felt from the anxiety of this never ending cycle.

I took long strides through the Constricting Cycle and still found no way out and no signs of a way out until I came to a wall with a square aperture punched through it. Through the aperture hundreds of feet away sat a tall and marbled stone that looked as if something had carved at this Ornate Cylinder. It lacked a base and seemed incapable of support. I chased

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the Cylinder through the Cycle until I found myself in a lonely stoneyard.

I entered through a curtain wall, though there was no view at this elevation for it to be there, and swiveled my head around to see if anyone was present. The interior was a dark yellow from the lamplight and next to each chair and each couch and on each counter were albums filled with pictures of people in love, clippings of accolades and recognitions, and abstract pieces of a better world. After studying the black and white photos and feeling enough in my stomach to get sick I returned them all and looked for a way up. There was a door where the yellowness stopped and lead to a staircase that connected the rectangle to the rooms above.

After rising three flights I came to a short hallway at the elbow of two rooms. In the room to my left was an easel and no windows, and in the room to my right was a window and nothing else. I made my way to the easel, curious of what was marked in paint. It was a frenzied reproduction of the Constricting Cycle that trapped me here, and I was rejuvenated to think that this was my map out. Tracing my fingers along all paths possible the furthest I was taken was to the spot I now occupied. At the bottom of the maze read the words there was a time this was easier. Heat filled my body as I tried the next room.

The window was a small square in the wall that sat a foot above my head. I grabbed the chair from the other room, and set it in front of the wall. From here I could rest my chin on the sill and look through the square to the outside world. It was nice to see the Earth again, but a cold reminder that it was unattainable. My shoulders sank underneath the bottom of the aperture. From the corner of the window in the outside wall came a bird that never flapped its wings, gliding over the landscape, and then a return of that awful sound. ___ “Listen, I had too much which I know isn’t an excuse. You have to understand how nervous I was to meet everyone for the first time and then you said what you said and you didn’t have to come after me you could have let me go, you know, I was going to come back it’s just that I…” she cut me off with an I’m done kind of motioning of her hands.

“You hurt me,” she said, which I think hurt me more. But nothing I could say would change what both of us knew: Tomorrow I would wake up without her. Tomorrow I would be alone in an airport. Tomorrow she would start her life again. Tomorrow I would try to find my own. Tomorrow she would talk to her friends and turn them all against me and I would have no way of explaining the past three years that had led us both to this point. Looking past her I saw a black sky and a black earth with one single line of tangerine that separated the two and my stomach dropped realizing how close tomorrow actually was. “I want you to go.”

I packed my bags, and within hours I was on a flight home. I wasn’t sure whether I was more anxious about flying or my destination, but the anxiety was quickly relieved by the captain as he filled the body of the plane with a voice like he was reporting for NPR, suggesting that the cabin brace for impact. The nose was diving at a steep degree and there were people crying, people calling their families, people closing their eyes and trying to control their breathing, people confessing their mutual love, and a group of passengers that

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had congregated at the back of the plane—ignoring the flight attendant’s pleas to obey the pilot’s instructions—as they prayed in a circle to who they were sure they would come to face in a matter of seconds.

I sat calmly in my empty row trying to associate myself with one of the groups, but couldn’t. The speed made my stomach turn like it does when you’re racing over hills in the backseat of a car. I placed my head back and inhaled deeply. I looked out over the dipping wing one last time to see the approaching land becoming much larger, and closed my eyes.

Right as we hit the earth the last words she said pumped through the final rush of blood sent from my heart: “If you’re so obsessed with the idea of feeling you might as well create a world of your own and forget about this one,” and that is when this one disappeared. ___ I watched the gliding bird long enough to see it vanish behind the other corner of the window and stepped back into the empty room where a small handle inside a rectangular outline cluing a chance at the outside world. I pulled it open to find a staircase that spiraled the length of the Ornate Cylinder, and a grate at the base allowed me to see that nothing, not even the earth, filled the Cylinder below. It was dim and the bottom was gone. Thinking back to the vividness of the Light, and the sweetness of the Island, this place became terrifying. I had given up color, and sound, and taste for this. I had so easily surrendered complacency for potential, and now my only option was to ascend into space with no assurance that I would resurface. As I entered the Cylinder my body squeezed through the wall scraping my left shoulder and I watched pieces of myself fall into the hot light below until I lost sight of the tiny, maroon particles.

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LONELINES APATHY LOVE REGRET FEAR AWE LOVE

L O N E L I N E S S

Piercing the depths of me, I bled out a darkness that had outgrown my frutile skeleton— relieving my veins of any further pressure too great to keep in.

This is me: In Fear 71

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In the Arms of An Unknown Under Great Petrification The cold marble kept my balance as I spun upward. There was a small hole in the middle of the stairs that they all seemed to revolve around and though it wasn’t large enough for a body to fit through, the lack of anything keeping me from trying made me nervous. The sky was getting closer, but not quickly, and the pressure made my ears push against the sides of my skull where my heart beat. Who I was inside of my mind and who I was outside of my mind were now two different entities often disagreeing with each other. I looked back to remind myself that it wasn’t too late to turn around but height sent a prickling sensation through the arches of my feet. After thirty or so revolutions my head poked out above the marble and I was in a mixture of mist and fog in a pale gray atmosphere.

Pulling myself up on a platform, I found only enough room for the width of one foot.

The surface my toes curled around was the same iridescent shade of the Island’s home, but less unbelievable. This surface seemed to be constructed from petrified wood possibly turned to stone below the grate of the stairs in the center of the earth heated and cooled and set into the marble. The color complimented the Ornate Cylinder. There was a sort of glossiness to both of them that suggested value, but the top layer was peeling off and the joint that held the Petrified Platform to the Cylinder was weak. I could feel it shake beneath me. ___ “I tried finding something that didn’t look like I had gotten it from a quarter machine, but according to the guy, ‘Opal is impossible to shop for’,” I said mimicking the feminine flick of the salesman’s hand as she put the ring on her left finger and pretended we were going to

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be together forever.

“I’m personally offended by that comment, but this makes up for it,” she replied waving her hand at the ground to watch the stone change colors. The falseness of the stone meant I would have an undeniable inclination to explain myself when asked about it, and unfortunately it seemed that I always came up a word shy of a genuine understanding from the listener. But she was happy. I could see it in her eyes and in the way she wasn’t saying anything—not having to shoo away the awkwardness of receiving something unwanted by talking around it—but I still felt it wasn’t enough.

So, here we both sat on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, and she was thinking about one thing—the way it never stopped shining—and I was thinking about whether or not her love for this stone’s glimmer was a product of a psychological defect in the realm of overcompensation or a certain redirection of attention that she may have acquired as a child growing up with two homes or a deficiency in some other area but in realizing this more visceral discourse was removing me from my own reality I concluded that the one with probable psychosis was myself and grabbed the side of her neck to meet her face long enough for any further development of self-deprecation to diminish.

“Are you actually going to wear that on your left hand,” I said as lightly as possible. I loved her, I thought, but we were far too young to joke about anything starting with the letter M. “Maybe, unless you want guys at bars getting the wrong idea,” she returned with the smile still on her face, but her eyes redirected at the sky.

“I’ll do that thing where I pretend I’m gay.”

“What if you’re not there? Or what if you are there and you do pull that card and the guy hitting on me goes both ways and tries to make a move both of us? Then we’re all fucked.”

“In more ways than one,” which was the first time I didn’t like the idea of sleeping with her. “I don’t know, I’ll cross that bridge when, if, we get there.” She switched the ring to the other hand and waved it the same way she had with her left, but with less imagination as to what she was wearing, who she had invited, what color her friends were wearing, if the church was too much, and if her father approved.

I was more scared now than ever. Not because I was thinking of how unreal the ring looked, or because of her left hand, or because of my almost-self-diagnosis, but because when I tried picturing who I was without her, everything lost its color, and after searching the future for any part left of myself to grab ahold of, it was all out of reach. ___ Just as I would start to catch my balance, my feet would slip out from under me. I was in the middle of a dense fog like it had floated here from the Desolate Channel, but now I could feel it inside when I inhaled. It was thick and cold and stayed in my lungs. I was afraid that if I inhaled any deeper I would drown. The Humid Sky collected on my forehead, and then around my eyes, down to my cheeks, and descended from my face. I didn’t watch it fall

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over the platform knowing its fate was the same as the pieces of me that trickled through the grate. The only difference now was that there was no firey resting place for these beads.

Nothing was absolute from here.

It was a chore now to consider the absolute. In fact, I couldn’t recognize anything as being absolute in the world besides the remaining space and time—a thought that surfaced as the humidity collided with the rest of the atmosphere. There was no distinction between the sky and the clouds. I could feel them graze my skin as they paraded around me while the loud percussion increased in tempo to warn me of the dangerous approach.

I had heard before that everything was resultant of space and time and that seemed true. I had even heard someone belonging to a more critical school of thought suggest that it was not only about space and time, but more specifically place and occasion, which was also not hard to believe. But, no matter the view or the specificity, no one had ever questioned the absoluteness of this concept. I couldn’t help but wonder why even transient emotions caused me instantaneous paralysis while even in the midst of darkness and collisions and shattering noise, that time and space continued on uninterrupted. Watching the clouds move around the platform, and the beads of water move in a different direction, and my body not moving at all, I concluded that these two things, space and time, were the only two things that had ever agreed upon complete dependence while maintaining a pureness of character. There is no duration in space and no distance in time and still these things are the only things that mate forever; the only things that are permanent. Though under a mutual understanding of dependence, it is as if they relied on each other for the qualities absent of an emotional bias. Maybe it was that they had let go of what they didn’t need, and had become inseparable because of it. Time has no place to be, and space has no sense of the past—unless you refine space to place and argue a humans footsteps on the moon and forget that a movie theater is what makes us believe that the impossible is, in fact, possible—but together they gain the opposite element’s root purpose through their eminent collision as the building blocks of the universe. I wanted to be time or space and subsequently find my antithesis as they had which brought me to focus on my inability to stay in any single scene I had passed through thus far.

I questioned my insistence on manipulating the decay of time in each place and why I chose to more or less ignore the purpose in each space and thought once more back to my recent discovery of absolutism which led me to debate whether or not this was revelatory and if so, even relevant, and then further questioned the difference between the two.

My legs were shaking from exhaustion, and it was always unknown how many steps before I would slip again. From underneath the clouds I saw something dark coming up from below. They were too far away to identify like the cars of a city from a view high above, but the memory of hitting the ground caused me to lose focus, and I slipped. ___ The Stewardess tapped me on the shoulder calling me sir and explained to me that I had been twitching while I was asleep and wanted to make sure I was okay, but really just wanted me to put my seatbelt back on before we landed. I told her it was just a bad dream though I was not yet convinced. I looked in the back to find no one praying, couples still not

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speaking from disagreements over their vacations, and the nose of the plane now level to the earth. We were floating feet from the runway, and it was the calmest place I had been in months. I wished to forever live in the limbo initiated by the unknown instant that the wheels would hit the ground. The closeness of the earth instilled a sort of fear in me; the final test of an investment in convenience if that’s what it was about and what life was worth: saving time. I was thoughtless and consumed in the moment awaiting the results, and the inhalation of musty air and a small portal to watch this all unfold was all I needed in that moment to occupy the usually unoccupiable void in my head. But I knew the force of the wheels hitting the ground would activate the past and the future and rip me from the present. The corrosive thoughts would return to me and I needed time to stop as I hovered so close to coming back to life. ___ I landed on a continuation of the Petrified Platform that was high enough to remain in the fog, low enough to see what was underneath me, and level to what had drawn me off the platform above. My back seesawed the path and my head was draped on the opposite side of my legs looking at a blurry reflection of an upside down face.

I rolled over slowly with a pulsing head and the pain of the fall pulsing in my left side.

Every bone destroyed. I unsteadily returned to my feet and tried to figure out a way to keep moving with only a fraction of myself.

The Humid Sky was overwhelmed with the pressure at this point and broke into separate cascading walls of warm precipitation. The reflecting face was present in the wall falling next to me, and the closeness of it felt like it would catch me if I slipped, but as I reached my hand to pierce the thin film, I felt alone again.

The Cascading Heat made a beautiful frame to what was ahead. The shining path split the walls perfectly in half and grounded me with their secureness. An overwhelming emotion blanketed me in the hot water melting from my face. I couldn’t tell if it was residual from the walls surrounding me or from my own eyes. ___ She was wearing an old t-shirt—gray that wrote something about a team she hadn’t been a part of—and reading through a phone with no news—an old habit.

“I really can’t take you like this,” I said about to cry myself. The makeup she usually rejected raccooned down her face bleeding deeply along her cheeks. It was the last time I would see her for more than a year. I was leaving in two days for the city and at the time I didn’t know if I would ever come back– this after the opal, and the party, and the hike through the mountains, but before she left for her own new state and long before she told me to leave for good which was almost comical looking back on how I felt in between—and I felt liberated.

She tried talking but no real words came out, only stammering from panic when she thought of what Tomorrow would feel like, and a week from then, and, if she made it that far,

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a year. That would have been the time for me to say something reassuring about our futureselves. I separated my lips to speak, but I couldn’t come up with anything real to say either. I figured since I was complacent with leaving that the least I could do was spare her the lying.

So, I left it open which I wish I would have known was the worst thing I could have done for the both of us.

It seemed like the right thing to do, giving her space. But the space I thought I was giving her was space for myself to fill with other things and other people that had no business occupying what could have been considered my new bedroom, living room, and kitchen altogether. My removed-self started to see the world as a brighter and bigger place. I bought flowers for strangers. I sent letters to places I’d never been before. I saw things I didn’t think could exist. I watched people on trains enviously watching other people departing for home. I heard people with unwashed hair and drug soaked veins preach about God. I spent days never moving. I spent days never sitting. I spent days walking around a place that forced me to never look down and never stop wandering. I read books about things I couldn’t yet comprehend.

I wrote notes like I could. I dressed like the people on the signs. I talked like the people who had been there all their lives. I ate expensive-tasting dinners with expensive-looking people in expensive-sounding places. I ate from trucks on back streets. I saw new love, and old love.

I saw new life, and old life. And then I saw myself. ___ It wasn’t me. It couldn’t have been. The hair was bright, and the body was long, but the face was a wash of pallor and fear. There was no color in its eyes and no bend in its lips, but there was a distinct line of darker skin that hinted at an unmistakable match to myself. I stuck my hands back in the water where its eyes were supposed to be and the holes from where I redirected the water pointed back to the Constricting Cycle. I could see the outline of the walls at the top weaving endlessly.

The static of the water was torturous. It cut my thoughts short—which now thinking about it may have been a good thing. Traveling deeper into the static of the Cascading Heat I felt a brush of fingertips on my skin. They were tiny and stuck like the water. In fact, they worked in tandem. It was beading down their angled arms and heading for my own. Now between the water refusing to repel and the Silver Hands refusing to release, I was slowing down. My face waning from the Heat, the static became a shrill cry, and the atmosphere of the Sky was evaporating altogether. ___

“Sometimes it’s just that two people don’t bring the best out in each other,” she said sitting across the room from me in the morning light. We were eleven stories up and far from the top. The building that held us was multiplied in the reflection of high-rises filling the space around us. I saw people that we should have been with moving lightly on the ground below, pushing each other around on the street to explore everything they could in the short time we had there. But us, we sat heavy in opposite corners barely ever exchanging glances. I couldn’t

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stop staring through the small separation of the two blinds. I didn’t want her to see me, but more-so I hated the thought of going back into the world so close to where we said the things we had the night before that robbed me of words in the morning. The light of the sun filled the room so beautifully, but so inappropriately.

“That’s not it,” I said though that was it. We brought out the worst in each other. She had turned me into something I didn’t think I was capable of being, and not in a way that you hear people cheering about at an anniversary dinner. I offered up arbitrary thoughts to trick her into thinking that later that night I would prove that everything was worth it, but she and I both knew that what we were was far past reparation, so I grabbed a towel and took a shower much longer than the day before, and much more alone.

I kept the water on though I was as clean enough. I knew that I would get out and dry off and have to pretend that the rest of our time together was going to be different. That I would have to go out and face the strangers I still called strangers and act like that night would be a different sort of night. That the sun outside would hit our skin and make us feel a different sort of way than how that room made us feel. That my intentions for coming here and my feelings for her were a much different sort of intensity than I had made it seem, and that I was a different sort of person than who she thought I might have been. And I knew that drying the water off my skin was the start of something worse, so I let it stick for as long as it would let me. ___ I watched it finally fall underneath the Humid Sky in small groups. The water was unsticking from my body, but the Silver Hands held on. The static was softening and I started to miss it as it was replaced with silence. I thought these hands were trying to pin me down, but they were leading me somewhere. Pushing and pulling my body unsympathetic to the still-pulsing left side of me. I was stumbling forward and only keeping my feet due to the elasticity of these Hands forgiving my fatigue. And then my feet were caught and my body bounced around the enclosure of the arms with an opening through the Cascading Heat.

Maybe this was the shortcut. Or maybe this was the end of this world. Or maybe both. I could take a step through the water and find myself falling an unknown distance to an unknown place with an unknown result, or it could be a haven from this constant imbalance. I wanted more time to think, but the hands were suggesting something different, so I stepped off of the platform through the water and waited for a surface beyond to catch me.

My feet landed in structure that controlled something outside and something important.

There was a static in here but not like the water. It was a noise that was high enough only to catch a dog’s attention and I wasn’t entirely sure that it was really there. The interior looked like what should have filled the central body of the Arachnid Compound. Small lights flashed on a board facing back towards the platform. There were numbers and letters and symbols denoting the purpose of each set of lights, but they were too foreign to assimilate to anything I had seen before.

I fell back into the wall behind me with an urge to yell out something at whatever or

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whomever was putting me through this but had no strength to confront it. There was one trail of humidity still left on my skin. The small pool and tail running away from it resembled the saliva that stuck to my arm from the Stranger’s lips. The marble felt colder on my back as I thought of the hot air that once existed between the Stranger and myself. I wondered if the Stranger knew how to get me out of this, and then I wondered if the Stranger was the one who put me here herself. All a plan much grander than I thought.

From this point, I could see a smaller version of the Island and the room She watched me depart from. She was still there with the weight taking a toll on her posture. I was too far to decipher an expression, but watched her wave her hand in my direction either to say hello or goodbye.

The floor shook unsteadily again, and then fell out from underneath me as I was suspended in the air without a measure of time before being caught by new arms. These arms were thin and long and lacked anything acting as fingers. The hairs were sharp and clear covering jet-black skin. Whatever was holding me was much bigger than myself and inhuman. At one point I felt every limb—this was assuming that eight was all of them—and there was a surprising grace in its multi-jointed caress. The rhythmic brush of the soft seta lulled me into sedation as I was pulled into a ventral embrace with my ankles fused together in a thin, silk knot. A strong heat was exhaled from the book lungs in a Humid Sky. It was dancing around my body touching every inch with such a complete touch. Like time pulling me through something I’d never understand. A bitter venom poured from the chelicera to my lips. Familiar in its form, I let it melt away my tongue. Its fangs surrounded my head and the silk still restricted my feet and the fear kept my eyes from meeting my incarcerator. But the fear was not a kind that would have sent me to my knees if I was upright and free. It was the kind of fear from an overwhelming stillness after a return from the ocean. One that shakes the core. A confusion that erupts from a complacency for an absolute or an ensuing resolve.

An acceptance of an end, and an indifference for a beginning. After spending so much of myself maintaining a balance, I had come to accept its dissolve, and so out of the arms of whatever held me, I fell.

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ESS L O N E L I N E S S

The once-hidden light ambuscaded an increasing darkness interrupting the imminent destruction of a malignant falsity for long enough to see that to let it die was the only way of finding life again.

This is me: In Awe

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Within Three Like-Houses of Unlike Qualities Luckily the first house was fit for a program that required an artillery of knives. The front of my pants was covered with the sand I had become acquainted with along the Desolate Channel and so were my elbows and so was the better part of my hair around the back of my neck. I had drug myself along the shore not being able to walk with my feet still tied from what dropped me above. The knot was taut like an impatient shoelace and after wearing the edges of my fingers thin, I gave up and pulled myself towards the house like a paraplegic.

Gray skies and dense fog, again, were all that surrounded my crawl to shelter. The sun was shining through the particles of water that floated in space and made small flickers of colorful light like the air possessing luciferin on a summer night. Dragonflies whizzed past competing amongst each other in tests of speed and avoidance of the webs that hid in the greenery above the beach. A special kind of daisy congregated below the insects all facing the same direction with the backs of their pedals towards the wind and their pistils pointed towards me at point blank range. Vultures and hawks circled above undistinguished, checking every so often to see if I was an option. The shades of everything were so powerfully pure— not a result of gas and electricity confined in glass houses, but a recognition of a more organic process from more organic places. Even the black feathers of the birds shimmered in multiple shades of a usually colorless black in the light of the sun.

I stopped moving to let the slow breeze that the flowers had turned their backs on curl around my arms, and released something from my chest that traveled with the current of air and conquered the silence. It wasn’t so much a cry as it was baritone harmonic to the

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alto wind. I had seen it done in movies and other fake realities before, but had never tried it myself. It felt awkward at first like writing with the other hand, but after realizing that there was no one present to offer judgment, I tried again this time moving my hands in tandem with the pattern of my breath: up, circling back, swinging down along my sides, and out into the world again.

Temporarily relieved of the voices in my head, I turned on my side and inched towards the first house. The three houses all faced the shore and all lined a common path.

Coming up from the side of the red house I was unable to look in the windows to check if anyone was inside, so I took my chances at the door. I grabbed the white trim of the entrance under a decaying wooden porch as leverage to get inside. The theme was a retroeighties black and white checkered tile with plastic furniture. Glass cases curved at the front to display freshly cut remains. That’s when I saw the knives hanging neatly behind the long case and above a cutting board. They shone with a fresh cleanliness and I was presented the sharpest one by a porcelain butcher wheeling past me to be repositioned as a greeter in the front. The smile on its face was painted higher than its ears, and the stomach was modeled after the man in the back watching me carefully.

Sliding the knife under the silk, I severed the tight and intertwining connections and stood up with my head close to splitting under a suspended fluorescent light with the heat of the bulb turning my hair into a warm blanket. Thick cherry clouds seeped through the skinny slits between the rectangular strips of plastic hanging in the doorway and draping over the man’s round body. He took a step back and used one outstretched arm painted with ink to peel back an opening for me. The cherry hue stuck to the side of him and accentuated evidence of age as I shrunk myself under his arm.

The square room had vaulted ceilings directly reflecting the exterior shape. The red that filled the smoke spilling into the front room must have been from the pools in front of me.

The plastic swung back in place and the painted man vanished.

The Cherry Pools were stagnant and thick. There were no windows, only lights along the ground shining upwards. Was this a darkroom—how the eyes became tailored to one tone?

Shades of pale pinks and deep purples created highlights and shadows of repetitive figures suspended from the ceiling. Sparkling jewelry attached to their ankles for display. My mouth watered at the sight... ___ “Have you cooked this before,” she asked as she ripped a trapezoidal shape off the fork.

“I’ve watched people cook it plenty of times,” I responded confidently.

“I’ve watched people play basketball plenty of times, and I’m still terrible,” she replied with a sarcastic tilt of her brow.

“There’s nicer ways of saying you don’t like my cooking, you know.”

“Okay, that’s not what I meant. You set me up for that. It’s actually really great, really.

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That’s why I asked. Not because it’s bad. Really. I like it,” she was more attractive on her heels.

“Yeah, sure,” I said with a playful wink to let her know where we stood, and grabbed her small chin between my thumb and index finger to taste what she was still tasting.

The hills rolled aggressively for the Midwest eating away at a burst of circular light with rapid speed while clouds joined us as the audience for this enchanting spectacle—though their seats were much farther above and much less emotionally involved since they were promised this each and every night while we were never promised anything.

Two trees folded over each other and sheltered us from the coming darkness. A watch tower emerged from the treeline over a stream that separated our hill from the others like each set of visitors had an island to themselves. I raised the glass in my hand and the mint leaf that floated between the ice cubes looked as if it was a part of the tree overhead, magnified from a distance.

The clear, fizzing liquid tingled my lips as I took a large sip that left a melancholy aftertaste. Time would skin me alive like the man at the supermarket had done to the animal we had just consumed. I thought back to the cold room beyond the wall separating us from the slaughtered creatures and questioned whether we were celebrating their death or our own and then congratulated us on enduring three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of each other.

She raised her glass and repeated the action. After a few exchanges of this we felt like being closer and traded places with the food and drinks in between us. And after a few more we decided that the only way of getting closer was to be somewhere else, so we left for home to try and fulfill the urges to be something more. It was odd to see that we could be so gentle until we lost sight of reality, and all of the sudden I wanted to hang her from the rafters. ___ She didn’t look secure enough to hang there forever, but at least until someone had their way with her. Her hair and skin were gone and her bones were tied the way mine had been.

A cold frost over her body contrasted well with the red running lights and the repetition of these bodies in neat rows and columns made her seem a part of something bigger though she wasn’t. I walked through the rows with my hands hitting each hoof like a baseball card in the spokes of an old bike; my feet shuffling through the Pools and splashing up on different parts of my body depending on the types of strides I made. The temperature in the Red House was below livable but the pools were warm. Feeling a tremor, I slipped inside one towards the back and floated until I stopped shaking. Resurfacing to take a breath, I sensed a taste of minerals, and then a wave of pleasure like I never outgrew pica.

I would have forgotten about the sun outside if it weren’t for a small crack in a door opposite the entrance. Turning around with a mixture of jealousy and guilt I said goodbye to the lifeless decorations and opened the door to face the sun.

The heat of its rays thawed my bones and I basked in it until I felt a tug on my shirt. I looked down and saw a small person looking up at me with squinty eyes. She was no older than someone who had just learned to speak and as cute as you could imagine a Squinty-

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Eyed-New-Speaker. She twirled her lips around a few times still staring up at me.

“Um, hello,” I said in a normal voice. I never felt comfortable changing my tone when talking to children. I was sure that they were over it, but hadn’t learned how to articulate being over it yet or just hadn’t been alive long enough to recognize what being over it felt like.

She looked over her right shoulder and then back to me and wrapped her whole hand around my pinky and leaned all of her body weight in one direction trying to move me. After a few seconds of admiring her serious attempts, I gave in and followed. She was the least harmful of anything that had yet to force me in a particular direction and the yellow house she was headed for radiated with a mixture of laughter and cries.

This Yellow House was a repetition of the Red House with the same white trim and the same pitched room and the same overhanging porch, but this time I could see in through the windows and this time it was full of people with a constant flow of entering and exiting.

The house split the other two and sat parallel to the ocean. A large shadow was cast overtop of myself and I felt the quick change of temperature like I had walked back into the room with the hanging hooves. The edge of the roof pried at the sun and bent the circle in different directions. It was as if the sun was a watering hose and the roof blocked pressure erratically creating a random spray of water and color.

On the house, the sun danced with the fresh paint creating a new life. Though the house and the sun stood still—assuming physics to be ignored—something moved between them.

Something seemed to skip around the sand and convince me to join in its waltz. My toes dug into the earth spinning without the help of my heels and the harmony of laughter from inside echoed into a symphonic metronome to guide my steps. ___ Either I was dizzy from the spinning or from the looks of her I couldn’t tell yet. The rest of our group was by the hotel flailing only their upper bodies to a deep bass that continued from song to song with the same 120 bpm.

“I think it’s kind of ridiculous that you came all of this way only to stay for one night,” she said with the process of unclothing, removing her makeup, telling her friends how lame the night had been, checking her phone to see my name in green above a lie in white, and reversing the whole process in a shorter time than she would’ve liked.

“I’m not actually leaving tomorrow. Although I feel like things between us would escalate quicker if I really did have to go to New York for a startup-business-IPO announcement.

Which if it’s still not too late to go with that, we can go with that,” I responded trying to be honest this time because I knew that if she found out this soon that I lied this much that things wouldn’t escalate at all.

“Yeah, I think it’s too late,” she looked frustrated but too tired to do anything about it.

“You think, or…”

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“It’s too late.”

“Right,” I thought that maybe she’d get the whole startup joke because who isn’t part of a startup, but she didn’t get the startup joke. “So, uh,” I continued unprepared.

“So are we going on the beach or not,” she asked like she had erased the past fifteen minutes from her brain which was a power I didn’t know if I’d be able to handle in the future.

Three kids stood in a circle with a phone playing from a searchlist of instrumentals and they all took turns trying to think of ways to destroy each other’s dignities until one of them made the fatal mistake of saying something about his life being like a movie and the worst part wasn’t that the idea was completely overused and hyperbolic, but that he ended the line with the word ‘film’ and had nothing left to work with.

“We should join them,” Spontaneous Me said.

“You should join them,” Not Spontaneous Her said pushing my body towards the group with her shoulder.

“I have a better idea. Let’s see who can get bitten by a shark first,” Spontaneous Me said while rolling up the legs of my pants.

“How is that a better idea,” Not Spontaneous Her said.

“Superlatives are subjective so if you want to spend the night arguing about opinions we can but I’d prefer that we don’t,” Spontaneous Me With Attitude said.

“You can’t possibly expect me to give up over semantics,” Not Spontaneous Her With More Attitude said as I stared at her until she gave up and followed me into the ocean.

We were shyly holding hands and looking around our legs that were submerged knee deep in dark water anxiously laughing at the thought of a shark actually having one or both of us for dinner—depending on the size of the shark.

I ran my foot up against hers and waited for her to ask me if I “felt that” and when she did I responded “no” with a look of terror and started to breathe heavier and when she stopped anxiously laughing and gripping my hand tighter I yelled an explicative and made a run for the beach as she did the same but I stopped a few steps in and she kept running.

When she finally made it back to the beach and turned to see that there either wasn’t a shark or that I was insane she shook her head like she was saying no and yes at the same time and I scooped water with both hands trying to reach her from where I stood. She danced away from it down the beach and I stayed in the water. The voices over the instrumentals and the beat from the hotel rooms and the laughing from her was all washed over by the sound the waves and the wind made when they both curled around me. A few boats gave color to the dark ocean and the orange lights from the complex rippled over the tide. My breathing was linked to the pattern of the water and made me feel separate from myself. I forgot about things concerning where I was, when it was, and who I was supposed to be. The only thing I remembered was that I was extremely alive. Her laughter came back and tried to pull me out

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of the water, and this time it wasn’t because I was drowning, but surprisingly the opposite. ___ The New-Speaker’s hand re-gripped my pinky and I felt the weight of her carry me inside. The interior was bright from plastered juvenile paintings of wonderful imaginations.

Two-headed trees fought talking carrots over upside down landscapes home to red-faced monsters. A giant football player scored a touchdown in an endzone with a field goal as tall as the stadium making the score 1000 to 0. An adult spoon and fork couple argued over who got custody of their baby spork—which I thought was particularly sad and telling of what that artist’s home-life was like.

The floor was a continuation of the sand outside. Bigger kids were huddled around smaller kids that had been buried alive and a single, continuous bench wrapped the outside of the sand box. Parents with tired faces watched emotionlessly to make sure their kid being buried alive at least had enough room to breathe. They all took turns looking up to spot their child and back to a choreographed swipe across tiny screens. The room didn’t need sunlight with the brightness of the burning glass. The parents’ faces were all a blueish gray tint and their eyes never blinked. The kids laughed at everything until they looked to see if anyone had witnessed and realized that they may not even exist. The laughter in the room transitioned to a cry and it took a while for the rest to notice.

The fingers wrapped around my own again and I looked down at the New-Speaker’s watery eyes. It was interesting to watch the way they filled up. They were brimming with salt but managing not to topple over her folded lids until she blinked and they shot down both cheeks like upside-down fireworks.

As I shrunk myself to her height, she wrapped her arms tightly around my back and squeezed the sides of my neck with her tears floating through my shirt and under my skin.

I think that my guess as to why she was crying would have been as good as hers but I also think that I would have been the only one trying to guess at what had made her so upset.

She was not looking for answers but for something that would wait with her for the feeling to pass. Wrapping my arms around her tiny bones, I felt a warmness that had yet to come from anything in tonight’s world. Not what dropped me from the Platform, not what floated in front of me in the Light, not what trapped me in the Cycle, and not even Her immersing touch.

She released me back into the sunlight. There was only one house left to be explored, though it wasn’t much of a house. It was an equal distance apart as the other two houses and was slightly elevated on a hill where grass grew between the particles of rock and shell. A path led from the overhanging porch up the graduating slope that connected the entrance of the second house to the third.

Dragonflies still chased each other around me and the daisies were more heavily populated on the incline. It didn’t take long to reach the door, but I bypassed it and stepped over the crumbled wall that the frame was once set in. The charred remains of wood broke off with ease as my feet planted on top of them and the fresh smell of smoke filled the air in 93

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the center of the original footprint. Soaked grass poked its head out of the ashes and colored the house blueish-green. There was no sign of anyone being here in any recent hours, and the only human-remain visible was a large head of a man tilted at me with kind eyes as to say that even though he was a victim, he forgave whoever had destroyed his home.

Near the head I saw that it was cut off at the same spot that the Holy Statue had been beheaded. I drew lines with my fingers along the side of its face and felt a rigamortis in the muscles of its jaw. A red copper dotted the forehead and stained the base of the neck challenging the aquamarine coating around the rest of the face. From the back of the head hung a medal ring connected to a chain that looked like a string of brain that was spilling out of the skull. I picked up the ring that was large enough to fit over my own head and drug it backwards.

When the chain would retract no further, I let go and a righteous voice spoke to the ocean with rare vigor. The tone was similar to the recordings of a mid-century presidents sharing his thoughts about the war he had somehow stumbled upon.

As the head spoke with sure rhetoric, I looked into the stark eyes that were too big to stare at any one person and noticed that after every point it made, the waves seemed to cheer in agreeance, and I thought maybe I was on their side. Whether or not this was due to the influential oceanic crowd behind me or the words that made everything around me stand taller and shine brighter, for the time being I did not challenge the validity of the claims though I found it a bit vain of it to take responsibility for the beauty I was engrossed in though it may have been the best explanation for what had pushed me through the night.

But the more words that came from the head, the more I grew tired of trying to follow this elaborate explanation of the past and unbelievable plan for the future so I gave up with the waves who had returned to a quiet hush and the chain returned to its original position and the voice quieted and everything went back to a less-alive version of itself.

A mezzanine and a colored window were all that remained of the upper part of the house. I walked up the dead steps to the next level and when I reached the top of the stairs, I was exposed to the grassy sand that connected all of the houses together where the line of almost-primary-colored-houses baked in the sunlight.

The stained glass looked like as if rock candy had melted in a frame. It was representative of the entire color wheel and reflected countless hours of details. One of the men in the scene was constructed of tiny yellows and browns resembling the face of the Righteous Voice with arms and legs reaching out to a woman who lay fetal on the ground in front of him. The sun shattered through the pieces. The man radiated over the woman who stayed the dark amber shade of glass she was chosen to be. The pieces fit smoothly together though they were obviously not cut from the same sheet and the window felt like a frozen part of the ocean it overlooked.

The bridge was the same marble that spanned from the Translucent Island and it traveled to where my eyes could no longer see. I didn’t know if I could trust it with how weak the house’s skeleton was, but decided that my desperation for the Stranger outweighed the risk

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of this bridge.

I side-stepped the glass and made my way out over the ocean. Two dragonflies kissed each other above my head and followed me as far offshore as they could.

The sun followed me as well until the jealousy of the Three Houses lured it back. The water was a fine distance below me and after the disappearance of the sun and consequently its glare, I was able to open my eyes fuller to watch the horizon.

A clear bulb floated through the clouds and anchored itself to the ground. The clarity of the Island was less obvious than before and I started to wonder whether or not I would even be able to find a way in.

The dome still hid the wonder of iridescence and made my stomach reach for a final sight of it. Approaching the glass encasement, I could see that below me was the bridge I had left on. The same regret I felt through the Constricting Cycle re-instituted itself in my chest. The Translucency was cold and smooth like a monochrome excerpt of the Green House’s glass.

I tried the door and it glided open like I would be reintroduced to the Whispering Gallery.

I continued through the door and shut the glass behind me. What was inside was not an iridescent masterpiece or a blank white canvas, but a fortified core that read as an impossible task to reach—assuming that it still existed.

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APATHY LOVE REGRET FEAR AWE LOVE

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Stagnant, it could no longer run.

Time turning sweetness to bitterness catalyzing age.

Ignored now not for its richness, but because to face it would in turn shatter us both to remnants.

This is me: In a Revisitation of Love 101

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In Fortified Ruins of Prior Translucency I started down the gradual slope without a notice of my existence. My chest dropped with the altitude as I searched around the Fortified Ruins. Her bedroom was neat and dark in a bland sense of each. Her sheets were an outdated print and nothing matched. I guess that I had failed to notice anything in the room before with the quickness that I found myself Immersed.

I wasn’t so strongly married to the idea that people could directly be reflected in the aesthetics of their bedroom, though it made sense. My own was barren. The walls were white and not covered with cheap band posters like this room though I was sure that I regarded music with a higher reverence. Incense was burning in the corning that left a wagging gray tale to the ceiling. Pictures of Her family like the ones in the lower rooms covered every desktop as if She thought the more faces She fit in there, the more real they would become and monograms hung from the walls and doors in case She had forgotten who She was.

I picked up one of the frames to investigate Her obsession with these people. Their skeletal structure was apparent in almost every part and their skin was worn at places that grouped them with the people outside of bars in frozen nights all huddled around tiny flaming sticks. The most tasteful clothes for the least tasteful places draped their bodies and awkwardly juxtaposed their wrinkled skin. What a beautifully similar crowd She fell into. I spent the longest time wondering if She was really like them, or just too loyal to tell the truth. ___ “And what did your mother say about it,” I said prepared for the worst.

“Fuck Him,” I shook my head in laughter though I was not amused. “I’m kidding, she

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was actually very sweet about the whole thing. I think that she was…” she looked around the room like she was about to give up inside information and risk everything starting with her job which would mean no new dishes and no new cabinets to put them in and no new apartment to put the cabinets or the dishes in and no new dog and definitely no new human because she would not be able to afford the baby of the future that was part of a new type of artificial insemination that dropped it out of the sky but not via stork because she was deathly afraid of birds and then finished her secret with: “happy for us.”

“No…” “I know. She’s changed.”

I told her that was nice but knew it was untrue. It’s not that I didn’t think that people could change. It was that I knew that she was not the type to see a need for it. We sat on her old grand piano that was out of tune and I stared at all of the pieces of her because I missed them and she seemed to forget that some of the most important ones existed. They all looked different than when I had left them — a little bit older and a little bit stronger, like how I had found them before I sanded them to a gentler core.

“I think I’ve changed too,” I said aloud though I wanted to keep it inside my head. There was something about her presence that made me want to reassure her that I would never purposefully cause harm though I knew it was inevitable.

She looked at me with a faint smile only in her lips and proceeded to inhale like she was waking herself up from a dream too sad to think about and asked: “So, what do you want to do first?”

I slid my fingers across the white keys feeling the separations until I fell on my favorite note and pressed down for a long measure—though it didn’t sound like it should—and suggested that we hike the mountain she talked so obsessively about so we changed shoes and left the note home alone. ___ A classical piece was brewing somewhere in the house that was far enough away to warp the sounds into one string. It was familiar but of the wrong genre. Maybe it was an orchestral attempt to classify something untaught which was a lovely thought and what drew me forwards. I passed the same guest room in the same hallway, but this time it looked as if no one had ever touched the room. The bed was neat and accented with a perfectly bent ear on the corner of the comforter. There were files and forgotten belongings like there should be and a closet that waited to be occupied by a temporary wardrobe. Though it was perfect, the thought of there being a guest room still did not sit well, so I shut the door hoping that in doing so I would repel future guests from thinking there was room for two and continued on.

There were no walls to expand and compress anymore and I could see out into the plain landscape the broken structure was balancing on and found no beauty in the sight. I recalled walking on the hard grass and wanted to surrender into the surrounding water to cool the itch that always came after. The entrance that should have nudged out to the side below me

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was a pile of stone which was relieving because I knew the difficulty it would cause for anyone else trying to find a way in. The amount of damage that had been done made me question the length of time that had passed between leaving and returning.

The sound was coming from the record player we first listened to in the room we first sat in and the words hung in the same manor we had left them, the only difference was a trail of torn words that led back down the hallway. I crawled slowly alongside the separated stanza to translate the trail.

Last night was different.

Someone fucked me awake; when I opened my eyes it was over, all the need gone by which I knew my life.

And for one instant I believed I was entering the stable dark of the earth and thought it would hold me After coming to the end I looked around with the feeling of Her there but saw no one. I knelt back down to collect the pieces and returned them to the inside cover of the desaturated planet, but when I closed the book the music did not stop. The lights bounced off the hexagonal walls and back to me with a futuristic tint that emitted no heat as I turned in the direction that the torn words once suggested, spinning around a disintegrating wall with wide steps leading me up to the middle, rectangular CenterPiece. This must have replaced the outside entrance—an entrance only for those already inside.

The steps were thin and long and dangerously constructed in a makeshift manner.

The grayness of the concrete matched the rest of the remaining parts of the home from the destruction of color. Puddles of the Dark Immersion sat on the thin steps. I created quadrants through the puddle with my fingers to feel what it was like on myself one last time. As my hands imprinted permanent wake in the navy puddle I closed my eyes to feel the spinning and sinking that I had before. ___ We had reached the top and she was breathing much heavier than I was but being very obvious in trying to conceal it by acting like the trees’ allergens were the cause and not a lack of times visiting the gym. There was a man-made recession in the mountain to overlook the dense collection of green clouds that separated us from the city. The straight lines that popped out of the treetops were the only mark of humanity. She was much less enthralled and still out of breath.

“Are you going to make it,” I asked in a light tone conscious of her habit of taking offense to almost everything.

“No, yeah I’m fine. Yeah, just you know, spring, and the trees and..” and then she walked back towards the middle of the recession to find somewhere to sit down.

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I found a place next to her and waited for her to say something about how she likes to come here and how she likes to think about something in particular that had been a deep and developing idea of hers that only manifested itself in nature and only grew as tall as she climbed, but instead she focused on her breathing.

Every time I looked at her it became more difficult to hold my eyes in any one place.

The beating of my heart never seemed to match up with hers and her breathing never seemed real. It was evident in the way that we spoke that we were both keeping something from each other and it wasn’t something that would come out with time but something that would buy my ticket away from her.

Nothing changed from the time we spent sitting between the trees that afternoon and the time we spent laying between the sheets that night. My hand rested on the thinnest part of her and tried to remember what it was like to claw at the skin that surrounded my fingers but could only recall the apathetic looseness I exhibited minutes before. Her heavy breathing could not fault the trees this time and not even the actions we surrendered ourselves to, but more than anything the danger that this recital uncovered.

My time here was limited, and it was becoming more evident with each breath that it was a mistake to think that something so deep could be salvaged after discrediting its potential and stunting its growth. I stole my hand from her waist and touched my eyes then my nose then my lips to make sure I was really lying where I was. __ The plum-navy covered all parts of my face as my fingers ran down my skin. I tried to scrape it off with the bottom of my shirt, and though most of it stuck to the fabric, I could still feel the numbing heaviness of it on myself. There seemed to be an endless amount of stairs to the top of the CenterPiece.

My steps became slower and slower the closer I got, convincing myself to continue upward. There was a short break in the wall next to me framing a view of the bridge that had led me to the Constricting Cycle and then into further darkness. I thought back to how I watched Her watch me go, and how I had let such a beautiful Island cave in on itself. I wasn’t sure who was more affected by my absence or if they were both impartial to it. The only advantage that the Stranger had over Her was not having to watch me leave, though that never stopped me from noticing the absence of someone close. I wondered if she could feel it then and if she’d feel me return.

I was feet from the entrance of the CenterPiece—unsure of how I would get in with all of the bolts and locks that covered the hinges—and could hear the wind adding to the orchestral background that was still increase in volume.

When I reached the door and found it locked, I used the side of my hand to signal I was outside, but no one answered, so I looked for a new way in. I walked to the edge to look out over the night. I could see everything from this point, and it all seemed much smaller now.

Colors spun brilliantly to the North. Silver machines pierced weakly to the East. Lines bent

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dizzily to the South. Houses sat beautifully to the West. And stone stretched dangerously in between. I could feel my feet teasing the edge and I did not stop moving and I did not stop to look down. ___ The wall below me extended far enough that my brain would have enough time to shut off from the recognition of what the ground had in store. People talked at the bottom mostly about things that had happened recently that had no bearing on the others future but seemed relevant to what had brought them together in the first place though they couldn’t recall exactly what that was right at that moment. It may have been due to the drinks that sat in between them or a strong reaction to the trees outside but they both knew that being together was better than being alone so they pretended that what each other said did actually affect how their lives would turn out in the coming years. I tried to pick out what different groups were saying, but it all sounded the same and the clanking of silverware and rummaging of luggage and beeping of elevators and whistling to cabs and soft music from a local band with a small local following but a big dream all overpowered the muffled conversations. She was back in the room and either fast asleep or pretending to be and the line of doors equally spaced on the wall that separated us made us feel further away than we were.

We had been one of those couples earlier—polluting the ground floor with meaningless conversations. I was ashamed that I had fallen victim of the contagious dialect. We used to talk about things with words like We and Us and Should and Will and now we only used I and Did which made for an easy way to run out of things to talk about with only the past and ourselves in mind. I think I spent more time practicing my use of chopsticks than I did forming conversations.

Seeing how small everyone was below, and how far away she seemed to be from here, I felt more justified in joining the couples than returning to her. Just as I set my hands on the railing, my pants buzzed twice. It was my mother.

Hope ur having a good nite. So excited 2 hear how it went. Call in the morning 2 tell plz (If you remember any of it LOL)

With an emoji at the end that traded its eyes for hearts which was meant to be used in a more romantic context than between a mother and son, but I never said anything because no one else used it with me and I liked the intention the tiny yellow face had. I decided I at least owed her a call in the morning so I took my hand from the railing and returned my phone. ___ Sliding my hand into my pocket, I rotated slowly to relive the past hours. The memories made my fingers twitch, and I felt something solid stop one of my nails from moving. I froze

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in my rotation and searched for what I had just felt. Recovering my hand, I opened my palm to see a golden piece of metal cut in a very specific way. It was the key I had taken from her apartment and the same shape as the lock on the CenterPiece. I looked out over the night once more before running back to the bolted door and found that I had failed to notice what once attempted to guard the inside of the house lying on its back with all of its legs retracted overtop of its body exhibiting no signs of life. The clear hairs had all fallen off and it was just a shell of itself that had turned cold and cracked from the weather and would soon roll away with the breeze.

The crescendo of strings was slowing down with the turn and click of the locks and the reveal of the interior CenterPiece. She was the only thing inside and rested with Her back on a glass case in the middle of a blank room. I expected some sort of mainframe, or a place where everything was hidden—cabinets to hold the files that I rigorously sorted for Her, or at least the dishes that were not yet in Her kitchen. I hoped for something that would explain this night and everything that came with it. A black masterplan of Her world in the broken glass of the case that held Her upright seemed to be it, but was missing its centerpiece which She held inside stacked palms. She wasn’t crying or laughing to mask a certain emotion like this night would have warranted, but waiting patiently for me to return.

But She was not waiting to jump into my arms. She was not waiting to feel me again.

Not waiting to expose me to the surface of Her or tell me about Her family or ask my opinion on the changes She had made to Her home or ask me why I had ever left. She was waiting to walk up to me, as She did, and calmly lift the iridescent flakes that once covered this facade from her hands with the wind from her lungs into the air in front of me. ___ She took the lifeless ring from the drawer it was forgotten in and placed it in my hand between the overlapping straps of my bags and stood on her toes to brush her lips against my cheek that left a watermark from her lips and from her eyes on myself forever. ___ My face was cold as the pieces made first contact. The broken edges slid through my skin and sat comfortably inside. Still in half-speed I backpedaled away from Her and watched the colors fill the distance created until my body was outside. She walked to the door and looked at me with disappointment and then pointed with Her eyes towards the uniform bridge that left the Island and back at me again as if to say good luck and swung the room shut.

There was no music left in the house and no other ways out but the bridge to my right.

The eight-legged creature had somehow made its way from the ruins back to it station outside of the door, lifeless.

The bridge was a straight shot through the thematic fog and lights, but I couldn’t keep my head up to notice if anything else surrounded me. The marbled surface turned into a hard cracked plane, and then covered itself in green blades. Drops of water frosted the tops of them with webs between them that had been constructed overnight.

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The flat plane turned to a hill and led me back to a concrete path along the edge of the complex. A black gate brightened with the street lights and I pulled open its heavy door to find what I left behind. Circling the courtyard from a story above, I came to a familiar feeling and tried the key from my pocket.

I untied my shoes and set them next to her unflattering hiking boots she had yet to put away. The kitchen was empty except for reminders of the party she had thrown the night before. The half-eaten pizza box had returned to its original position in the time I had been gone along with a bottle of red wine that spilled over the table still stained from the condensation of our body heat. Remains of her wardrobe clothed the floor in the same place I had ignored them in, and a glass of unfinished water sat under the overhead vent. I set my things on the table and searched the warmly-lit room that was losing its strength from contention with the white light overhead.

I could barely see her under the sheets with just one closed eye and bleached streaks bleeding from the pillow. Placing a vinyl circle on the table next us, I slipped under the White Sea before the words had a chance to wake her. As the man through the speakers explained his constant dreams of a certain girl, she stretched her body and made a charming sound that attempted to form words I couldn’t make out and rolled over to rest her lips on my shoulder.

That side of me rose in temperature as her eyes flickered open to ask me where I had gone.

I turned over with the sheets covering most of my face to gain equality as the White Sea morphed us back into one.

“You’ve been twitching since you fell asleep,” she whispered with laughter.

She pulled her hand from the sea and rested it on mine in a way that made it look like I was the one wearing the opal ring. Her golden eyes smiled brighter than her lips and I kissed the top of her head.

“Must have been another bad dream,” I replied.

“You and your dreams,” she breathed with a shake of misunderstanding marking a clear point in time when I could no longer recognize her. I searched the apartment to find something that could help me out of the room that had not stopped spinning, but the only escape was the kitchen, so I headed to the refrigerator to find something to eat and saw a brilliant light calling my name.

This is me: In Defense of Feeling

110

Dream /Drem/

noun noun: dream; plural nouns: dreams

- a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep.

- a state of mind in which someone is or seems to be unaware of their immediate surroundings.

-a cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal.

-an unrealistic or self-deluding fantasy.

-a person or thing perceived as wonderful or perfect.

Wake up...