dream deep

There is a forest, the forest of silence, and of course I have been here before. My fingers hurt, can’t you feel them screaming, isn’t that sign enough to tell you that I have prior experience in these things that don’t matter? There is a river, a stream, an ocean, an unidentified body of water, and there are snakes and lizards and lizard-gods and snake-gods and they are all wanting the same thing.

A high building, blue and full of stairwells, always stairwells to other places that lead to more stairwells. Dark and full, hung with those little yellow light bulbs that flicker. A fall off an edge, something that was planned in the little free time they gave us. A dingy cafeteria, do you remember how we sat around in our terrycloth bathrobes and made small talk about nothing? How you must regret that now.

Nakedness was never an issue with us, we walked around in our skins the same way other people breathed or ate or did drugs. We gamboled like puppies, we dove off ledges into the pool, that awesome more-than-Olympic-sized thing, and we grabbed each other and made bonfire-piles out of our bodies and counted all our selves like we had all the time in the world, and it was true. Time never existed for us, it never would exist. There was only the Now and the Present and the Current and the feel of your skin against mine as we swung around madly in circles, unashamed.

This is never what it’s supposed to be. All the déjà vu I feel, all the nakedness we cover up, all the flying and falling and doing drugs like we breathed air, none of it is relevant to whatever it is we happen to be doing.

I break our promise and sleep in, two hundred thousand miles away you wait for me under the window waiting waiting waiting so we can kill that cat together and do what we’re supposed to do. There were boats and windows in walls that bordered trees and rivers and tall, tall tree houses that made us feel like we never had to come down again.