「 14G27 」
I find myself in its depths every once in a while, approximately once a month to gauge it more accurately. These dreams are usually accompanied by an throbbing sense of unbelonging, this time which was culminated in the appearance of that face.
That cursed moment when I first thought my dreams connected with reality still lingers in my mind.
I was stepping through the musky comfort of my hometown’s library, when suddenly the end of an aisle led me to the enormous depths of that other library. Perhaps my mind spliced the books with the cathedral, it was so heartrendingly cavernous.
As I turned my head, the section opened up like a doorway from Wolf Children, with the light instead occupying a drawing room. My eyes adjusted to the light and focused on two figures, and my heart fell through six levels of canopy. My jolted movements turned their gazes around.
For the love of God, please don’t approach me. Don’t appear while I’m trying to close my eyes. Don’t look at me as I will myself to fade into the books underneath my clutching fingertips. Don’t tell me the story. Don’t turn into a crowd. I know my shadow carries more years than that one. I know my years carry more shadows. That is why I’m pressed into rows and rows of words, and not sitting at that desk.
I ran and ran until I tripped into another dream
「 18D11 reality 」
01
I am focused on my notebook, the page is blank. I trace the vacant lines. As I ponder and look up, an image blinks into focus at the end of a row of long empty tables.
Is it him? Am I delusional? Indistinguishable. Does it matter?
I walk down the unnaturally lengthened room towards the place he last occupied before my eyes closed. A rush of breath evocative of an intimate voice surrounds me as I skim past the corner. I blink at the unfazed lights in confusion, feeling misled and abandoned.
Frankly my grasp on reality has been slipping lately. It's become progressively harder to discern if I'm hallucinating or dreaming. I prefer the latter, although my taste in company has begun to shift in the past months.
It's a strange feeling to have when your dreams begin to bleed into reality. How do you come to terms with the seeping notion that you are starting to lose your mind, but also that you in fact welcome the onset of it? You tell no one. That first flicker in the corner of your eye is disturbing and liberating at the same time. Like a novice lucid dreamer, you begin to realize your mind can be coerced into molding reality in alternate textures.
The discerning moment was when I started reading you into the narration of my everyday stories, squeezing you into the margins no matter how hectic my world progressed. Slowly I accepted your presence, tentatively charting the hours of my day as I learned to integrate your ever-increasing appearances into my life.
I choose to ignore you this particular day in November, telling myself that conversing with you is an indulgence. I scroll through spreadsheets at work, but your fleeting thoughts manage to flicker through to me as the meaningless pages of numbers flash by like zoetropes. Pricking me like a festering crush, your words penetrate my stubborn concentration.
"Hello." I reluctantly acknowledge you at 03:26pm. You lean in my office doorway, your hair a sprawling auburn.
"Go away." I quickly interject, the moment I suspect an attempt at conversation. Things between us are tense. Each time you come to visit, my coworkers staunchly turn and keep to themselves as soon as we begin to converse. I don't think a single person has asked you how your day has been since you began to visit. As much as I feel conflicted about your announced visitation, I still find their behaviour mildly rude and off-putting. Still, it's true that nobody in their right mind would invite you here.
Sometimes I feel like I only started encoding memories with my first recollection of you, when my name first emerged from your mouth. If anything of significance happened before that, I recall shades of it with difficulty.
I hear your voice peering out from in between the strange cadences of certain songs. I catch myself turning my head and mouthing your name before halting in embarrassment.
At 05:14pm, I humour your company as I take the long way home. At this point I am still suspicious of your general presence in my life. I'm not sure how many terrible things I've muttered under my breath and thrown your way since then, flung about in some kind of perverted game of lacrosse.
Days later, I open my eyes with a natural suspicion towards the existence and permanence of anything present in my life. I approach his sleeping figure and notice the mossy texture of his skin that runs deeply into his open eyes. I almost feel like I can see the infinitesimally small particles emanating from his shift in consciousness, flesh and breath and thought de-mingling into a structurally insignificant powder. All the information of his existence, occupying nothingness, beautifully loose and ready to seep into the net of the present.
I feel like time has got to still and bubble in order for any grooming of chaos to occur. In social settings, we typically isolate ourselves through sleep. A meditative altar where we can induce and recreate the conditions in which our dreams can trim and blend reality into the rough canvas of our minds. Sometimes the sun whispers through the old windows and taps the glass into calm ripples that spread themselves out upon my faded blue sheets. The glow seems to bounce off each facet of our existence as we are buoyant and poised, stroking our skin with warmth. Everything looks and tastes granular as the sun forays into the darkness, even the air.
02
Emptiness is such a hard substance to portray. I'm not even sure you can quite call it an emotion, but it almost always feels too substantive to be described as empty. When I step outside and push in my headphones, when I choose to enter the world as a deaf-mute, I'm not sure if it's an act of cowardice, or if I'm trying to distill something from the hectic field of noise.
Occasionally, a taste of emotion will lurch out of my throat and push itself into my mouth, reminding me of a time filled with happiness of such a high percentage that it tastes like a revolution that's been ruthlessly gunned down. Out of the bitterness, you eventually emerge. I'm sure you hate this provocation of your existence as much as I do. I feel like apologizing for the regularity of our conversations during which my mind is on the verge of drowning in some foreign molecule out of desperation. Lurid poses proceed in stop-motion behind my open eyelids, slamming into my vision once a day before bedtime until I see stars.
I wish you would make your presence known earlier in the day. Sometimes I wonder if you stalk me, because so often you appear far too precisely as the sun draws its curtains. I never get to see you in the morning, unless I stay up so late I start losing my mind. On these rare occasions, you beckon towards my bed by grazing your fingernails along the border of my pillowcases. Sleep feels empty and wasteful when you aren’t there.
Sometimes I see a portion of your profile imprinted in my eyes after the sun glints off a stranger’s glasses. Other time I’ll hear a sound byte of your voice in the compression of a familiar tune. I see glimmers of your eyes in a boyish laugh, and for a moment everything becomes overwhelmed by the texture of your hair in my fingers, until I’m slowly reeled back in by the taste of rust on my lip.
Today, the throbbing in my head persists with a shade of violet blue, engulfing me like a suffocating fog. I go under, my brain branded with searing loops of pain. Somewhere inside my head a voice requests your presence, but all I can do is feebly part my mouth as my eyes sink further away from reality.
As I hurtle towards my temporary and ever-changing destination, soft acid bass and harpsichord plucking my consciousness, another person’s universe slips into mine for exactly 28 seconds. Their heartbeat sustains mine with a continual breath of life during a time I am unable to provide my own. When their hands gently withdraw from my ears, my bubble of the world slowly seeps back in. I find myself still breathing, reality drifting back over me like a heavy morning fog. I sit up, lowering each scale-like fragment of my shell back into place. The unease continues to orbit me as I numbly progress through my day. With a serene drifting motion, the unseen trajectories begin to pick up grime and smoke, accumulating into little drifting islands with tremendous density, suspended by cracking mental acuity.
The day draws on. My vision begins to fail as the sun sets, the lights flowing past me dimmed by an unnatural amount of darkness. In my next memory, you have said something to make me laugh, and I throw my head back in silent laughter as I squint into the void-like night sky. The buildings begin to flicker into fir and pine, the street lights flashing like fairy lights as I veer closer to the edge of the road. I reach with grasping hands, half heartedly trying to replant cement into soil, but weariness drapes over me like a suffocating tarp and my hands come to rest on a rough cement barricade. This is the last time I will remember being alive for a substantial length of time.
03
I am 2,783 miles away when I open my eyes. The insisten rain patters down on the soaked front porch, the air saturated with the scent of countless frayed storylines.
「 14H22 dream_ 」
we will both grow so long
hearts carpeting
the thousand miles
of telephone poles
that there will be
a 100 in 1 chance
that a tendril of yours
will wander
onto a stray thread of mine
my name will grow into your heart
just as your voice
has become imprinted
in mine
「 22F11 coalescence 」
it was like something collected
like dew on the glass
and then it settled
and solidified
some hint of
a sweet lapping at
the bottom of my rib cage
that i felt in Nanjing
breathing in the green
and the smog
and the heat
listening to Imaginary Folklore
but something coalesced
and peace has turned into fact
and i know
that we are in it now
/ index / narrative / lyrics-poems / 15J13-yeahright-stay
at the time i had
that discomposure
when the green collapsed,
right next to you
but when we collide
in borrowed time,
then the blue might finally stay
⚘