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| Late at night, I believe in the many-worlds quantum interpretation of the universe, that at every possible decision A or event B, a complete duplicate of the universe is created, with either A or not A chosen, B or not B happening.
Every written word, spelled out by twenty-six humble characters, draws rough boundaries around my thoughts and ideas; I can't begin to comprehend the complexities involved in word choice, rhythm, and meter--why the exact same message and medium can sound like adolescent drivel from one author and concentrated insight from another.
And so, at every quantum choice, I wonder if I appeased the correct goddess from the correct dream, a Satanic deity no doubt, but nevertheless a cursed muse from fantasies past, wrought from fibers drawn from pleasant memories of warm summers and cloud-gazing and fireworks beneath the bleachers, an amalgamation of what I could consider youth and freedom and an eternal past, patched together by a blind weaver, operating her loom with jointless fingers by smell and sound and touch alone, never giving a care to the visual aesthetics of her work.
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| I dreamt an icy wind ruffled frigid fingers through my hair, bristling through my eyebrows and freezing the sight from my eyes until I was left with a glassy lens through which to view the world, blind and distorted and beautiful in its own crippled, imperfect way. A horrifying defect upon the appearance of my world-view, a cancerous mole, hairy, protruding from my mind, drawing toward it all attention, feeling, emotion, love. I could, would, should love. But, the wind whispers, how can you love the world if you can't even see it? How will you know its truths with frozen eyes and a blinded heart, unaware of any actual, underlying reality? You are blind, she whispers, blind like a small child, young and inexperienced, and flits past my face, dragging an icy fingernail deep into my cheek.
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| Alone on rain-damp bleachers under a hazy, dusky blanket, I spoke to myself a year ago on this date and warned, mulled, stretched my imagination and being, fingers on my temples massaging nagging memories into deeper recesses like compressing silent films, frame-by-frame, into grainier and grainier images, stills upon a reel. Each breath brought with it moments, minutes, weeks, years of emotional catharsis, the last bloody remnants of a stubborn, squeezable ketchup bottle purging its final teaspoon, each spurt less elegant than the last, every breath raspier and coarser, colder.
I remember blinking the dry dust from my eyes a month later as I swung higher and higher, circles within circles, thrown backward on my head through the air like a beach ball in a high-school auditorium. And as I spun upside-down one last time I remember the final spurt of phlegmy nostalgia heaving clear of my back throat, sliding down my lower brain stem and hurtling toward the ground with a purpose, like childhood photographs fading from years of unprotected sun.
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| Each day melds into the shadow of the last, each step and breath and piercing glance draws me further and further into a thick, warm, apprehensive fog wrapped around my wrist and waist, drawing me closer, pulling me deeper, thrusting my soul and shins toward a dimming light, flickering, flickering, gone. Tomorrow becomes an hour closer, today leaves me behind, crumpled on the side of the road in my own castaway clothes, draped over my twisted legs like a crumpled scarecrow.
I once had a dream of a dream of flying, soaring through the blinding clouds on ethereal wings and feathers, but I was just falling and slipping and sliding and twisting soundlessly through an empty sky, ripped at the seams by leathery claws and talons, ripping at my shirt and buttons, ripping at my wings. I drew a sheathed sword and swung at air, thick, gruesome air, smog bred with dust and grit and grime, a dragon of industrial phlegm, writhing deep within my lungs, twisting and lurching with silent coughs, painful like a death in a silent film.
If only I could see eternity in the mirror, beauty gazing back at me with her veiled eyes, but instead I see a crimson stain, rusty flesh, mocking me. Taunting. A single splotch of dried plasma, cells, life, lingering in the middle of my heart, in the middle of my heartless glaze, a single drop, a single iota of feeling, sense, life, drying, dying, dead. It throws itself sideways like the center bearing in Newton's cradle, frame of reference sliding back and forth, each impact pounding my worldview sideways, sideways, sideways, but it sways as strongly as my heartbeat pulls it, pushes it; nowhere, lingering, dried.
Many a night ago I sweated love unto my brow in a dream of life and happiness but I could not remove the stifling harness of reality, saccharine, shackle-like reality, piercings through my soul like a ring through a bull, drawing me onward, toward, forward. I wiped my sweat with rags of my little past, childlike feelings entwined with a silken blanket, draping, drifting, drooping, a makeshift fort about my face, protection against the dangers of the night. I felt my breathing echo against my cheeks, raspy, pithy breaths scraping against my face, carving their existence into the flesh of my bones, screeching for freedom, against anxiety, toward relief, sweet relief.
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