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.