A Dream

Nothing is familiar. All of the places and people I know the names of do not look the same, though they have the same titles. I drown in black, dry ink, emitting from the press I operate. My lungs shrink, but they do not return their expansion. The beings beside me only stare, because I am doing something wrong. They judge my asphyxiation. Retreating to where I remember the bathroom being located, I am successful in my hunt and attempt to wash the ink out. When my dry skin laps the water up, I am instantly in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, slithering my way through the gridlock. There is an accident on the side of the street and my car, without my help, steers to it until I can see all the mangled, bloodied pounds of flesh at the bottom of an immense pile of sand. I cannot know whether anyone else has found this, so I swing my car door open, half circle my vehicle, and start climbing down the mound. The backgrounds of everything twist like the unfocused objects in a shroom trip and, upon looking up towards the top of the sand, I see a solid, few lines of people watching me. My nerve endings push me off balance. My mouth fills with miniscule pebbles and dust and again, I cannot inhale. I attempt only once to climb my way back up the sand hill, but when my feet sink, I lie down and sink with them.

Gifts

 
            I give people things so they will remember me, so when we haven’t talked in years and they don’t even know if I’m alive or have done something stupid, fallen in with the wrong mix and am currently half-breathing on some rotting, off-yellow couch in South Mexico with blood gliding down the syringe invading my arm, like a child on a slip-n-slide in slow motion, they will think of me and consider these things.

            There must be a list, somewhere in time, being scribbled by some angel on probation that is attempting to prove to god that I am a good person. This list’s contents: Heather O’Neill, Sharon Olds, Albert Camus, and Robert Pirsig books; Righteous Brothers, Bob Dylan and Neutral Milk Hotel LP’s; elephant and giraffe wood carvings (whittled by yours truly); various band t-shirts; fairly large sums of money; and gallons upon gallons of drinks filled up in bars and backyards. It is my hope that that angel, spoken of previously, can bathe in the purity of my heart, but in that hope, I assume I have drank it all up through one of the swirling and bending toy straws my mother, to this day, keeps around.

            Still, I imagine you, fingers twirling the carpet while you sink in with each turn of that vinyl I scoured record stores for and (upon discovering in the one dollar bin hiding towards the back corner) bought for you, playing back me, however you remember me. I see you, as well, a whiskey cooling on your nightstand, scanning the letters of each page, though not actually reading, because you are thinking of the time we were drugged, lying down in a garage, explaining our views of existence to one another. And I invent you, lonely after a fight with your girlfriend, smiling before you sleep because of when I pissed in your neighbor’s yard after a number of beers and shots of vodka I will never remember the count of.

Perhaps existing in others’ minds at times is all I need. Perhaps it is what causes me to exist. Perhaps that is what makes me a narcissist, but perhaps I’m just like everyone else, because we are all narcissists, no matter who gets the blame.