D'Mask'd Substance[s] of Dreams [and a Date]

 

"Red and a little more red"

-Richard Siken

Red letters
red_lines

It's this dream.  There's the blanket of black text on a white screen.  Some of the words change to become red. Or perhaps all the words have been red all along and it is as if only now can I see it, their true colors bleeding through. I had this dream today, perhaps not for the first time, but if I've dreamt it before I cannot remember.

Wearing my favorite jeans and wondering if anyone else can see that I'm masking. The barista spells my name with a 'y' and there is no need to correct him. On a first date one wants to walk that line between being perceived as normal, social, able to blend in, but also, able to stand-out, be special, unique.  I have opted to bring my book into the coffee shop, to show how old-fashioned I am amidst the world of phone zombies.  I sit up straight, remembering the one-word cue my mother used to prime me with: "posture!" Pretend you're civilized, not this schlub who slouches at the dinner table.  What would be the best version of myself to present?  It could be proposed that the compulsion to Stand Out is itself the mask, and if I were to take off this mask I'd be just like everybody else. Maybe, before she gets here I have time to readjust.  Behind the counter the coffee-makers are laughing uproariously, one of them almost snorting. A fresh burst of wiggly, anxious power-pop bursts through the recessed overhead speakers. The world doesn't revolve around me. They call my name, spelled with a y, and I can feel through the cardboard cup that the chai is still too hot for my taste.  The world doesn't care.

Red words
red eyes

I have this daydream where I box up all the books in my apartment and move.  I haven't decided where. Someplace green & wet and cool & alive. Somewhere where Spring is a smiling verdant surface veneer, some grand not-yet ruined city, not-yet soiled or sad and tawdry. With a handful of new friends. Night after night I could go for walks, maybe to a hotel bar, or a lamplit square with cool stone tiles across from a cathedral.  It all starts with boxing up these books. My safety blanket of language.  I daydream as my eyes skate across page after page. Dreams as the masks of  the subconscious. 

What's that old song, Frog Went A-Courting? I have been texting her for a week. She works in insurance.  You know in Tron when Flynn laughs at the program when he finds out he's an actuarial?  Don't do that.  Don't comment on her accent.  Check pocket for condoms, I stopped on the way here and bought three, and because it's always weird to just by condoms I also bought a bucket of red paint and a dish sponge, a Scrub Daddy.  She texts "am outside. let me know when you get here"  But I've been here for twenty minutes and type back "Oh, I'm already inside :-) " Should have put on more cologne. Shouldn't have brought this book. Packing for Mars by Mary Roach. What was I thinking?   She enters and gives me a hug.  Her accent is immediately noticeable. We give each other one-armed hugs.

a whole red alphabet of purpose and direction

-Quodlibet da Luz

one red planet
many giant red suns

In this dream I'm living in my old house by the lake.  It's been converted into a foster home for boys and they are very curious as to how I know about the secret door behind the bookshelf.  I show them the books my father never read, still there, and they ask why I read books backward.  I didn't know I did.  Then we take off and we are driving ten different roads and somehow all arrive at the end of each of them simultaneously by falling straight into a heart, its cataracts bursting with blood and light. It's night and I fall past a building, full of empty rooms, the lights still on waiting for someone to return, and feel the wind whipping away the sweat from my armpits and brow as I fall into the gushing tumult of the heart shouting "you've got to try this" but no sound comes out.

Occasionally the conversation gets going, things pick up, flow state, occasionally we get lost and reorient ourselves around our phones. I stop reminding myself not to comment on her accent.  "What are you reading?" 
"Oh, it's about the space program. I like space, but I could never be an astronaut." 
"Why not?" 
I think of my nascent adult nausea as discovered on the teacup rides, my propensity for idleness and procrastination, trying to masturbate while floating.  She tells me the practiced narrative of her vindictive family, I mention staying in touch with my brother but these strings pull at nothing.  She has to be going.  Another one-armed hug. Hours later I remember the Trojans in my pocket and wonder why I bother.  Sex is a strange urge.  It's persistant, but conciously so, unlike, say, breathing or heartbeats.  I box up my books, one quarter-shelf at a time.  Some of them, it occurs to me, must have red letters printed inside.  Perhaps they're hiding in plain sight.  Maybe if I squint I can see it.

read the 
red coda already

God smells like clean laundry, and collects stories that he keeps in a mahagony traveling case.  God asks me for my story and I feel a burning inside me, like this spark I've been carrying all my life, like a firefly throughout the propulsiveness of a hurricane, has suddenly become a flaming torch at the top of a lighthouse.  I tell God that the locust was imprisoned under the ground for 17 years, plotting and scheming, to only to be born without a mouth.  God laughs before I get to the end, evidently He already knows this one.

My friend left his wife and he's been real quiet lately. He came over the help me paint. One big empty red wall. I like the way the light comes in now, letting the room be what it will be.  And afterwards we watch the evening begin and he comments upon the temperature. Keeps using the words "forty degree swing." I pretend that this needs to be heard and nod, not sure what to do next, watching the luxurious springtime langorousness of the vacant lot like it was one of those Japanese gardens made only of rocks and sand so the beauty doesn't get concealed by looks. My looks, I think, have been concealing my beauty for years now.  Or possibly my ugliness. Two birds fly past and I note, aloud, that they have rings around their necks. "Well, this has been a real slice of heaven but I best be getting back," says my friend. We shake hands.  It's been a good day overall.  But I realized recently that I can't put my arms around memories. Perhaps that will be the grand prize someday, if I ever get lucky enough to get old, maybe I'll get old enough to forget all the sadness, and only remember the good.

"I'm painting a room in a colourful way, and

when my mind goes wondering

there it will go."

-The Beatles

The Leaving and the Left

When I left she cried.  It was gray day.  Slushy snow was on the ground and whirling clouds variously flocculate and drift, vaporously relaying their ambiguous messages overhead.  She weaved her rickety VW through dawdling traffic into town, across the overpass and to the bus station.

            "I've never been to this part of the city before," she said, and I looked at her.  Diamond earrings, jazzy red shirt and designer handbag.  Of course she hadn't.  We parked in a narrow space around back and waited a tense second before either of us said anything.

            "Guess I'll make sure its on time," I said.

            "I'll go with you," she offered, making sure to lock the door behind her twice. 

Everything seems simple until you think about it.

I wish I could take some virtuous delight in reporting on those who I've left. Sadly, they were all good people. Maybe they weren't. Can't remember any ruinous souls left strewn along the path. The blessing of memory is its selectivity. Dark spots are filled in like vacuous holes with the bright glow of warmer recollections. I remember leaving because reason won out on emotion. I remember leaving my heart behind. I remember being left.

When you stop moving you die.

Funny to think of exes. The very word, X, when spoken sounds like some strangely tallied scantron scorecard, the record sheet of how you've passed the relationship tests of life. "I'm still friends with all my exes," one reports solicitously. The ghosts of the past, our X's. X's crossed in bed. X's crossed via mass email status update. X's stretching back in a line of fading regret, from the familiar permanence of the present to the emptiness and echoes of the evanescent past.

I remember being left, when everything felt so right.  I remember a day in the park on grass tall and green and glossy and we lie on our sides and I stared up at the latticework of tree branches until they kissed the dark blue matt of penumbral sky where a storm was sounding its thunderous chords to signal impending dramatic entrance.  "I'll walk into the sky," I said dreamily and she sighed.  A gawky teenage boy polishing off the firmament of his imagination with a goddess at his wing.

            "I can't do this," she said, and miraculously everything within me suddenly shrank until I was terrifyingly small and the world was enormous.  Unfamiliar and abstract.  Blades of grass towering over a massive, jagged and alien landscape.  Ants were ferocious monsters in a dreadful convalescence of ferocious monsters.  I cried.  I remember I cried.  And everything around me seemed it had all along been in disguise, violently falling into unrecognizable pieces in a puzzle on the floor that itself reassembled into other figures, other puzzles.

The clouds move in aqueous silence as tiny flecks of snow start their slow descent over everything and I heft my bag from the trunk and board the bus. Springboard. I'll make it there by dark, I think, when she calls. On a phone, in her car, just outside the parked and revving bus in the parking lot.
            "I just wanted to say," she says, and starts to cry.
"It's okay," I console. Mercy. 

You never cried. Every time I left you, to think, and there were never tears. Maybe it was always assumed that I would be coming back. And even in exile, I always did.

All those commas that made up our otherwise levitant sentence, when for all others I wriggle away leaving only the skidsmear of a question mark. I wish I could take delight in so many questions, but to say I do would be a lie.

They who would believe anything, even lies they believe.

Another ex. Another mark on the page of time. Would you that I were now another one ledgered onto yours? Me who keeps moving. Me who keeps coming back. Traveling the world far and wide, sending postcards signed with an X to all those young friends now old and established into their fringes of the firmament. Me of the murkiest sexual compulsions, searching sad nights for a fix, the gas tank running low and the miles and miles of city ceaseless streaming passed, probing the unrecognizable lights for some grand statement, some grand conclusion, something wild and grand and free. You?