06/17/14

Chase is dead, but leaning against the side of the stall. Had he stiffened there? Rigor mortis? Was he dead? Was I too late? The prospect of him being alive and needing intervention that only I was there to give but was completely unable to give was more terrifying than the prospect of me having to tell Rhonda that he was dead. I walk up to him and put my hand in front of his nostrils to make sure he is not breathing. He jolts upright suddenly and changes from a white Arabian into a leopard Appaloosa and begins wildly careening around the stall, and I am swept up onto his back with my hands knotting into his mane and I am stuck and unable to leave as I am feeling my bones breaking as he slams into walls and throws himself into the air screaming in pain. I am yelling at him to stop, stop hurting himself like this, and screaming for Rhonda or Bettina or Tim or someone to come and help but they are all suddenly in front of the stall watching sadly and telling me that there is nothing they can do--I just need to stay with him. They leave and I am stuck on Chase's back as he howls in a way I never want to hear from a horse again and bolts around the stall and I am sobbing on him begging him to stop but irrevocably tangled into him and unable to do anything but scream and scream and scream with him until he dies.

Awaken.

05/26/14

Karl drives me to my house, but it is an expansive log cabin. He looks at me expectantly, and I realize that we are here to buy him weed. I walk into the kitchen and am blinded by the walls of windows and then Shawn Smith walks out of my mother's room. I whimper softly to myself but boldly go up to him and start taking off my clothes--he will only sell me weed if I sleep with him first. He is a giant man of proportions that I do not understand and his beard is large and he is on top of me and I try to move him further away so I can move and make it enjoyable for myself but he is unmoving and pouring sweat over me and when he is finished I am disturbed and pissed off at Karl. He tells me $70 for 20grams and I nod and take the plastic bag that he hands me. I don't know anything about weed or how much 20 grams is or what it would normally go for, and I am pretty sure the bag just contains five little pieces of broccoli, but I don't want to appear really stupid in from of Shawn now and if Karl had really wanted this to go well then he should have gone himself or given me better instructions. I go back outside and get into Karl's car. I glare at him a bit and we drive off. He will want to sleep with me to make up for this, but I will just stare into the distance in that familiar silence of mine.

Awaken.

05/20/14

People are coming in my room (giant, black, wispy bodies with dangerous limbs) and I can't open my left eye and I wait I wait I wait I can hear them filling in the hallway and pressing up against my door and there are too many bodies shoved and crushed against my door and I am trying to keep my paralyzed eyes open so I have enough time to scream but they burst through and I know that I will not be able to scream for Benjamin loud enough before they slit my throat.

Awaken.

04/15/14

We are at Hannah's wedding. I am in my cobalt dress, but the back plunges all the way down to my tailbone. I am sitting at a table laughing and trying not to sound to hollow to these people I am struggling to connect with. Natalie comes over and sits in my lap, curling into me. I breathe her for a while to feel less sad, but soon she is gone to congratulate her sister bride. I turn back to the table of people I could have been family with and then feel a light hand on my shoulder. I turn to look up at you, who are smiling down gently at me. "Would you want to dance with me?" I kick off my heels so we are the same height again, stand up, and you lead me on your arm to the dance floor. We are far apart at first, and your hand's light touch as it slides from my waist to my hip sends flames shooting across my skin. A text sends from my phone to Erik: "I am legitimately happy for the first time in a very, very long time." The photographer comes near and you pull me closer; I feel the body heat from you radiate over my skin and I feel warm in a way I have not been in so very long. My arms dangle around your neck and my chin is on your shoulder. I feel your beard hairs tickle my cheek and I grin uncontrollably. You feel my smile and turn your head slightly to kiss my dimple. The song changes, and we slide apart and begin dancing wildly. I missed how you looked in your dress shoes. As we dance I can see us from a distance, and we have certainly changed. My face is gaunter now, riddled with new, fine lines from sadness and pain, and even though my eyes sparkle they are surrounded by those giant sleepless bags that are growing beneath them. Your shoulders look filled out again, but your belt is pulled tighter and your stomach is more concave than usual (have you been eating? I will feed you!). The song ends and I stop to catch my breath, hands on my hips and laughing. I am so happy, even as I feel the moment ending and know that you will leave again. You graze my forearm with your fingers and familiar needles shoot from my nerves and up my spinal cord, releasing a flood of serotonin. "Do you want to go back to my place?" you ask and my throat instantly closes up. I narrow my eyes, but your face is open as it ever has been. "This isn't...sexual or anything, right?" I ask, and you nod. I am beginning to say "then, yes" but your hand slides around my waist and pulls me close and the word stops in my throat as I try not to cry.

I am wearing your pajama pants and your light blue Eisley shirt. We are in your new apartment. I crawl slowly onto the bed and stretch out, sore from the dancing. I can feel you staring at my legs, and you say "I forgot how long they were" when you see me watching your gaze. You grin and your crows feet appear, causing my heart to catch in my throat--I loved those most of all. You pat the bed and I slide into the space between your chest and your arm. I press my cheeks into your bony, protruding sternum, and soon feel it become soaked with my tears. I try to wipe them away, but my fingers get lost in memories as soon as I touch your chest hair and now I am rubbing your chest singing "soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fuuuuur" and you softly laugh before pulling me closer whispering "hey...hey. Samantha, I am right here" and you are wiping away my tears. I unfold on you and feel our legs tangle as your arm is firm against my back, pushing me against you where I need to be. I fall to sleep, my body growing limp as my face slowly slides off your chest and my nose is buried on your armpit. Sleep. Sleep. Warm. Sleep.

I wake up and you are gone? Please, no. NO. I cover my mouth with my hand as my heart falls into that stillness that has surrounded me these past months. I still have that sense of peace God gave me that morning when he told me to keep preparing myself for you, but it is still surrounded by the empty screaming death that knows I will never end up with you. And how it screams. I swing my legs off of your bed, surrounded by the smell of detergent and I know that I will have to run a very long time if I am ever going to stop crying today. My feet hit your floor (but whose ship came washed up on whose shore? and from what ocean floor?) and my body collapses suddenly. At least I was not in the shower this time. At least I can force myself to stand back up (oh God, why must I lay in this grave of a body for so long?). I look back and your bed is dissolving from my tears. I am cold again. No. NO.

In the living room we run into each other. I smell that you were cooking a Ben Cole breakfast. You didn't leave? I can see you staring in sadness into the still screams that you see in my eyes as I feel that flicker of hope and longing that I have come to hate (it comes all the time, when I think about you, and I have to quench it because it is false, crazy, all a dream). You open your mouth, hesitant as I start swaying again, feeling another collapse coming on. "Samantha..." you say and I swallow a heavy heart knowing that no one else will ever say my name like that. You kneel down before me and take my hands. You look up at me. I gaze blankly down. That flicker of hope is going crazy and my soul is weeping as it tries to put it out (it never will die down). "Samantha..." you say, grabbing my left hand and stretching it out. My body catches fire instantly and my vision blurs and everything everything EVERYTHING is feeling all at once and the deadness and screaming has given way to something new and alive and the stones in my eyes are alive with praise and oh GOD I am on fire fire fire because as you say "...please come home" I see that you put a ring on me while I slept (you never sold it? YOU NEVER SOLD IT) and it is black and gold and glistening and perfect and I collapse (but not from my body locking up in sad, empty deaths--this is me falling open and everything good is spilling out and into me again and we are breathing each other OH MY GOD I CAN BREATHE and the air rushes into my lungs and you were right: I forgot how to breathe). I am in your arms bawling, bawling, bawling and your warm, strong arms that are enclosing me are the only things keeping me honest.

Flashbacks. All at once. Tracks and films overlayed. Every time that you told me that you were going to be the one I woke up to when I was sixty, every time that you told me you would always be there for me, every time that you grabbed me by the shoulders and yelled to me "I CHOSE YOU, SAMANTHA. I CHOOSE YOU EVERY DAY." I believe you. I believed you. I always believed you. I never believed a day of you choosing someone else. I always KNEW you would come back to me to finish living out those promises. I still chose you every day. I did. I did. I did. I do not know how else to say "I love you." Your skin has had my name whispered into every inch of it and you have tattooed yourself across every part of my soul. Every flashback that has haunted me is stacked upon itself and I see it blossom into fruition. Yes. This is how it is supposed to be. We choose each other.

"I-" I stammer. "I am not going to give up my friends or family. I don't believe that. But I have messed up, lover, I have. Be with me. I promise I will be with you. Always. All ways. Marry me. I am ready to be home." and we are crying into each other and laughing and made perfect in each others love and

Awaken.

[[My face is covered in tears and I bite my pillow trying not to scream out in pain and my body shivers and quakes and every organ of mine is wrenched in this familiar loneliness. Why. No. Why do I have dreams like that. Why. No. It is too real. It is everything that I want. Everything. Everything. I raise my head (that is now ready for marriage and I HATE IT WHY DID THAT COME SO LATE) and my vision is streaked with tears and I look at the clock and I still have hours until my alarm goes off and I am just choking and weeping and. and. I will never be home. Lover, where did you go?]]

04/14/14

We are in a sunbaked parking lot, dry heat steaming up from the cracks in the pavement as the bright bright concrete reflects the glaring sun into my eyes. I breathe deeply, wishing there was moisture in the air, before ducking into a large, metal gym. The heat is almost worse inside, the air staler, but the glare is gone at least. No windows. I hear a metal cage descend over the building (structural reinforcement?) but ignore it and push open a series of heavy, hot, metal doors. I finally find the roller derby game, and drag myself up onto the metal bleachers which are burning hot, despite being in the shade. I watch with heavy-lidded eyes. I could do this. Be a roller derby girl. I could. "THE DOORS ARE LOCKED." I hear a scream. The metal cage. I was so blind. I see my brother from across the gym--how did he get here? No. God no. Not Joseph. I run to doors and began delivering blows to the thinnest section of the thick, hot metal. It does not bend. There is no glare, because there are no windows. I lift my head, sweat rolling down my neck and stinging in the creases of my skin. The metal cage will crush us. Slowly crush the whole gym like a giant wad of paper. Will we all be forced into the center, alive, pressed together in a giant fleshy, writhing, sweating, screaming glob of humans before being crushed into each other to death? Or will some die on the outskirts, crushed in the folding bleachers? Between doors? Someone shouts "IT GIVES" and we all start moving towards some doors that have been blown out, letting in the scalding sun and dusty, heavy air. Some of the kids are in basketball uniforms and linger in the gym. "Ha, while everyone is out we will stay in and have a REAL game of basketball." My throat is dry. My eyes are wet with dried up tears. No liquid, just stinging salt. "Joseph...please," I choke out, in the most pleading voice I have ever heard. He looks up, wide-eyed and terrified and begins moving towards me as I start shaking in relief. We will live to see another day out in the sun that will burn off our skin. I take his hand. We walk through the door as I fight the urge to run away screaming. We are free.

Awaken.

04/12/14

I am trying to hug Rebecca, but you and Tara are flirting around the corners of my vision and I cannot stand that. Tara has deer legs and you are growing antlers and I hate it hate it hate it (this Rush reference was obviously meant to taunt only me). I leave Rebecca and go to a giant kiosk lined with swords, and pull down four pairs of weapons. As I pull them down, the kiosk plays a sound clip, and I realize that these are weapons from games and movies. I probably would be able to choose better if I knew enough about games and movies to recognize any of these. After I strap on my weapons, I throw the first pair of them, swords curved sharply like scythes (from Zelda?) and they hit the target I was aiming at and then retract right back to my hands. I am a little embarrassed--I did not know that they did that. If I had, I probably would not have selfishly took four pairs of them. Ah well.

Awaken.

04/07/14

I'm in the back pasture of Spirit Reins with Tim, Bettina, and a crazy wild child. I cannot remember what he was doing that was so awful, but Tim was just kicking dust and weeding the arena while Bettina cried and chased him out to a fence where he climbed over it and was escaping towards the woods. I approached the fence and held out my arms, whispered something that I wish I could remember, and felt his cold, dead eyes turn to fixate on me. Bettina was crying because he was lost, and this devil child crouched in the branches of a tree and stared and stared and stared. I stood with my arms open, whispering loving words I was struggling to believe into the silence, and his cold, black eyes stared back at me from his three year-old body that held too much pain. He slowly slid through the branches to the end of the fence, and instead of carefully navigating the barbed wire top, he slowly rolled off of the branch, closing his eyes, and fell to where he knew my arms would catch him. I held back a scream, unsure whether I could catch him before he hit the barbed wire (for I was also busy trying to keep the cows away who were charging us with scared and frantic screams). I felt his weight slide into my arms and soon this devil child was nestled against my torso, arms wrapped around my neck in an embrace, as I took the stones from his eyes and he fell to sleep.

I was walking along the southern fence trying to take a picture of what I presumed to be a cow. It had one giant horn on one side of its head, and its body was like a long sheepdog's and it moved like an amoeba. It was something from a Miyazaki film and I needed to show the picture to Elizabeth. Nothing would do it justice though, and I left with the child still in my arms.

I'm on the beach side, going down an old and rotten wooden staircase that has been unveiled by the low tide. I stop suddenly as I see three boys at the bottom of the stair case, posing for their ideals. Thomas Newman, Garth, and someone I can't remember. "Ah," I think, "that makes sense that they are friends."

I am back with Tim and Bettina and I am crouched between a man's legs, sawing off his testicles with a dull, thin rock, puncturing his penis and making a mangled mess out of his genitals. I pull back, for he did not notice me, and he is running off down the hall, naked and screaming for something my body refused to understand. I turn and see Tim and Bettina holding a small, Asian girl with green in her hair and large, terrified, beautiful eyes. That was her dad, and he was looking for her to rape her again. We run through the maze-like Japanese office until we find him, and begin confronting him in calm, reasonable words. He understands some of what we say, and calms down and agrees that what he did and was doing was wrong, and that he will stop. We turn to leave, and he grabs the girl and begins groping her. He immediately stops, and begins shaking in fear and rage. "WHERE DID IT GO WHERE DID IT GO?" he begins shrieking and shrieking and I am holding Tim and Bettina back with a wry smirk as he begins crying and screaming because he realized he does not have an erection. The girl is a tiny doll now and he is frantically rubbing her over his flaccid penis screaming because he can feel his urges inside of him but now has no release he can get from her because of me. (and as I watch from my seat in my lucid dream I roll my eyes, because castration does not affect your ability to get an erection. although castration with a rock probably would, considering how awful of a job I did at it.) He throws her down and runs away screaming, knowing he will never live to his equine past. I start walking with the girl down the hallway in the other direction and the man cries out her name right behind us.

I am in an office with Tim and Bettina and they ask, warily, "She didn't turn around to answer him, did she?" I nod and they slowly shake their heads, lowering them in sadness. They know. Was I supposed to have known?

The Asian girl turns around, her dad throws acid in her face, scowling at her and me before turning and fleeing. The girl turns slowly around to face me, me who cut off her father's sexual release and failed to protect her from the acid (am I responsible? why did I castrate him? i don't believe in that. am I responsible for her face?). Her face is like melted wax dripping off of a frame made of open, screaming flesh. Through droops hanging off of patches of vein-pulsing muscles she slowly raises her gaze (I can only see one eye, the other is ruined) to look at me with the softest and most defeated sadness. She would have moved beyond the sexual assault. But now. But now...? This will be with her forever. Her large, terrified, beautiful eyes are now flesh pockets of grief and a slow wishing that she was dead instead. Her appearance is not gross to me, and nothing about this is scary. We stand in the hallway looking at each other as I wonder how much control I had over this, how much should I have known before hand, and if there is anything I can do now? Can I? Or do I just sit with her and wait in agony as she is forced to live on in a life she never wanted?

 

Awaken.

04/04/14

I am in your new apartment with my dad. You are telling him about how proud you are of your new life and I go into your room to use the toilet in there. Clothes are everywhere--covering the toilet and spilling out from every imaginable crevice in your walls and furniture. I can hear you saying how proud you were that you did your laundry and I am overcome with sadness at this. I want to take care of you, and it takes all of my self-control not to begin folding and organizing and cleaning this messy hovel. I finally unearth the toilet but I hear you talking now of how there is this storm inside of you and you are bleeding apart inside and you bought a new gun, loaded it, and cocked it, just in case. I sift through piles and piles of your clothes and belongings and finally grasp the cool barrel of the gun as you yell through the door to see why I am taking so long. I yell something back and slip the gun out the patio door and under your workbench--I will pick it up from there once I leave. I will keep you safe. I feel sick just having touched it, and I wish I could have discharged it, but this loaded gun is too soon and present to take my sweet time with it. I am crying at your life and want to swoop in and fix it and be everything you need, but for now all I can do is steal the firearms you are turning on yourself.

Awaken.

04/02/14

keyframe
n. a moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your life—set in motion not by a series of jolting epiphanies but by tiny imperceptible differences between one ordinary day and the next, until entire years of your memory can be compressed into a handful of indelible images—which prevents you from rewinding the past, but allows you to move forward without endless buffering.



I'm going dress shopping in different stores but everything looks stupid or is in a size completely incompatible with my body. Mom keeps running in after me, pissed off and waving a bottle of maple syrup at me, while I try to keep Arianna from seeing by pointing at stud-covered boots. Bad Christian music is playing and I make a joke about it--Arianna laughs, but I worry she is thinking I am mocking all of Christianity. No! Just the music. Just this stupid music.

I am Dr. Cox, beaten and bloody with my son in the doctor's office. I am defeated and worn and breaking and I do not know how to be vulnerable enough to tell my partners. Jordan and another girl in a green dress--green dress is newer and more headstrong about us but that might just be the newness of us making her seem so strong. Jordan is forever beautiful in the background but is she strong for me or just worn out like me and withdrawn? They come in, and green dress girl goes to a stranger's kid a coos over him, asking if she can take him home and begins going around collecting every kid she can see in her arms--every kid except for ours, Jack. Jordan steps in the room and scoops up Jack and stands across the room, meeting my eyes and I instantly see that she knows something is so wrong so very, very wrong with me but she is going to wait until we are alone to talk about it. For now she is just going to stand here and hold the world together until we can fall apart together.

I am on an island with six other cartoons and we need to start thinking about finding a food supply. I give them buckets and they start scooping the sand beneath the water and dumping it on our tinytinytiny island for me to sift through and find crabs but I see that they are destroying the small base of land we have and soon we will have no island at all. I am shrieking at them to stop but they are singing cartoon songs and loosening the base of the island and I know we are going to die and it will be my fault.

Awaken.