I'm Still Frustrated From Last Night

I don't remember my story, really. I love it. Coming to the pen or mouse and formulating a story then forgetting it, as if to read it with fresh eyes and mindset the next morning. Like a newcomer.

Well this one marks the end of my compilation for English. I felt like Benjamin, "7 down and 4.5 tomorrow and I'll be out of here." Well, I'm out of here and it's 4:50 a.m. I don't mind the latter part of that sentence, really, but the first part...

Narcolepsy Falls Asleep

Sheep laced his eyelids as he chased them with a rounded staff. It was 30 May in a sweet, breathy time of 1965. Summer had held its door open for the other three seasons, and now it simply awaited its turn at the threshold. Air was saturated with its arrival, and in rooms above and below the man's room children could be heard and seen. A happy time for all, and a happy time for the healthy. For the ill and their friends, the summer seemed as nothing but a warmth to put one to sleep. Crickets still hummed at his windowsill, and he choked down the desire to swallow a sleep pill of summer spring morning, and assembled his frame to stumble into the morning. Unbearably half asleep, his eyes could not contrast the images of his dreams which still played with the stark images of reality. He turned on his car, and on his radio, and hummed a silent cricket hymn all the way to the hospital parking lot.

A usual pity spot was vacant for his arrival, and nurses could be seen up the width and length of halls with eyes fixated on their watches, then on him. He was a regular.

A cricket fanfare still replayed in his mind by the time the elevator reached the fifth floor. The trumpets were really swinging, and those bass tones were perfectly tuned. He rushed his stroll a bit and reached a white room in the midst of a hundred other white rooms.

"What'll it be today?" A familiar voice called from a pair of eyes focused solely on Silias Parkway.

"Sonatina in F, Clementi. Second movement." From below the glassed eyes, a smile formed where there was once none. She came into full view very quietly, much like a horrendous mirage of illness and malady. Her grace and acceptance could balance and neutralize the mutest of malicious fates, though, and it enveloped the room and even the corners. It somehow managed to miss her, though. Every time he tried.

"Tell me of your dream."

"I was in the sea, and I was drowning. You slept at the bottom, but you weren't drowning. Just alive."

"How could I be alive, asleep, underwater, and not drowning all at once, dear?"

"Once you sleep, you will understand the nature of dreams." He sighed and wrung his towel-mop hands. Moping the floor of his forehead from a summer splash of dew, he continued with a wearier tone than before, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could recount such tales to me? If the story could be switched and the tables turned? I would love to hear the pages of your mind."

"I'm much too preoccupied to sleep."

"You're ill. Your main occupation is health, and I think sleep will aide that."

A quiet hum of the sink next door filled in a quieter void. The left unsaid hung there like a presage: the couple knew of the woman's fate. Sleep nor dreams could not serve her well, for they knew all too well that her hospital bed was indeed her deathbed. Now they just gambled a game called "waiting."

When the night had beckoned in an azure of the saddest and most absent sun, she asked him to take his leave. She ushered him out the door with her stern voice, void of wonder of anything save a starving death of living. Back on the streets, the alive looked dead as well. Those without beds or a place of rest wandered without purpose on the streets in the summer, basking in an antithesis of summer meaning. He quickly sidestepped them all, but even more quickly glanced a minute view to their eyes. Glazed over and deprive of sleep, a human could only appear alive in the least sense. Rather sad, he thought, that they were left uninvited to the land of Nod, to lay upon the breast of sleep and dream and the mind at its least unshed of reality. How sad, how sad, he thought again, that they would spend 24 hours in reality while he would only spend 18 in the spiteful state.

Summer drowsiness awoke him the next morning, just as the last 237. Just another tick in the final count of the days it took to decay her soul and body of a deathly life.

"What'll it be today?"

"Nocturne, Chopin. Second."

"Now you're just teasing me," she simpered. Always so good-natured, always so naive. He took a seat next to her and studied Silias Parkway. A large school obstructed most of the view of the pier, but a small skyline of water and wood could be barely seen. A child hopped into school, backpack slung over her shoulder, and he watched her as she appeared in intervals at the school's windows. Like little frames of a camera film, he watched her voyage from the school yard to her teacher's room. Turning to the woman, he gave a side grin of victory.

"No dream last night. Pitifully black, and sorrowfully silent. That is all I can recall."

"Now I know you're teasing me."

"I want you to see for yourself."

"You know that my days are short." Her voice was suddenly small, childlike. She couldn't face him, and instead intently studied the lamppost on Silias. He felt as though he had reprimanded her, for she looked guilty of an imminent but unwanted fate. "I cannot spend days asleep when soon that'll be my only way to spend them."

"You're already dead, damn it! Look at yourself!"

Ashamed, he found himself in the middle of the parking lot.

Asleep, he found himself on the kitchen table next to a small wallet that was not his own. The wallet's contents soon were splayed by his hands, and carefully arranged on the illusion floor. Pictures, all a deep shade of tungsten and flash, covered every inch of the floor until he felt as though they formed a sea of frozen memories. He had to escape them; he was drowning in her even in his sweet nighttime memories and moments. Images mirrored on the walls of every room in the apartment, and his closed eye grew sleepy with drunkenness. Tired and willing, he awoke in a pallid pearl sweat of the same summer that greeted him the night before and the 237 before that. Tick, tick.

She didn't want to talk about anything this morning. Anything but Silias parkway, anyway. She expatiated in great detail the emotion that the playful school children led her to feel, and the contrast of a summer scene of sea behind the fall and spring staple of school. She spoke, eloquently and in painstaking detail, of the contrast of hues and skies and the different episodes and stations the weather seemed to teeter between. She showed him short stories she had written, in a shaky hand, the night before of what she thought dreaming must feel like.

He knew that she felt she had something to prove.

She was trying to prove that she wasn't dead yet, and she could try her hardest to observe and record what she had left of her minutes. She scrunched her limited time like an alloted ink pad, composing verse and mathematics of the chaos theory that is life. Sickened and saddened, he abrogated her proof.

"I had a dream about you last night."

"A dream of the dreamless one? Ironic, isn't it? Are you beckoning me teasingly again into something I cannot have?"

He left no detail suspended and left a space of silence and listening for her to fill as she wished. Again, the sink next door, seemingly omni-running, spilled out a solo of droplets until she had heard enough and wished to talk of her own accord.

"What'll it be today?"

He already had a reply in his mind. "Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin."

"I'll have none of that." She took his hand and tried to appear as though she had forgotten the past day's comment.

Once she saw to it that he had left and driven off of Silias Parkway, she leaned against the dark glass and closed her eyes. She filled the blank canvas of her mind with paint, and tried to arrange them into an image with form and line and color and shape, but they just remained the haphazard guts of thought and wishes. She closed her eyes tighter, and could see a deepest shade of sea glass, warm in hues of winter and frigid in its summer pallet. Why, she conjured within her mind, what a ridiculous view of life. She scoffed and lifted her eyelids and peered some more into the night life of an empty street.

When the pair of angel eyelashes met, in the frame of a fifth floor window overlooking Silias Parkway, the other half of the story lay like a welcoming tomb of thought on his bed. On the streets and in homes, true life asphyxiated the life that lay beneath those eyelashes, beneath the dense and dull skull frame of men. Beneath the flesh and pity and guns and money lay a world unfettered by the fates or the sun, in which only the moon could drench so generously in an appropriated span of hours. And in the frame of that fifth floor window, Silias Parkway watched her unlatch the door of her mind, and allow a free strangling of her dying soul.

He needed to make her see that the only murderer in her hospital room was life, that sick variation of life that lay awake like strewn parts of a human on the streets. That sick life that found homes within strangers' eyes, homes among soft moonlight, a home in the heart of a stranger in a white room.

On the 240th morning on the sunny sidewalk set on June 2, 1965, he set out into his car and radio and cricket symphony routine with a purpose. When he met her in the room, he began to speak vehemently before filling her ears with the foolish nonsense of a song.

"I didn't dream last night. I didn't even sleep. I read an old book I found in the closet that belonged to your sister. She had given it to you as a present and you tossed it among the old photos and yearbooks." Staring still, her voice was taciturn and controlled as she mumbled an appropriate response to the outlandish greeting. He did not know her well, but he understood that this meant to continue. "It was about a little boy who was abused and beaten by his father, but the mother loved the boy very much but couldn't tear the family apart. The mother wished to keep the integrity of a family image, even if it hurt her and the boy. Besides the point, yes, that it. Anyway, one night the boy was feared the be growing old enough to understand the reality of his father's beatings and temper. He found that, for the first time in his short and single digit years, he could not sleep. His mother walked into the room at around 1 a.m. to check on him and asked him why he was still lying awake and so still. He answered that he began to have spells of memories in the past few nights, and they were so entertainingly real and violent that he could not bear to enhance them with the lenses of sleep. His mother told him that sheep grazed in peaceful rows of 10 each night in the minds of every sleeper, and a fence was constructed next to them. She told him that if he closed his eyes and counted the sheep jumping over the fence, they would herd him into a gentle slumber full of silent and still dreams. She left, and he closed his eyes but saw nothing. The poor boy trusted his loving mother so much that he stole away from the house at that nighttime hour and wandered into a neighbor's farm to count the sheep. He began to count them one by one, and noticed a row with only 9. And then a row with only 4. And several with numbers far from 10, in either direction. He began to grow frightfully worried and fretted that his dreams would not be as peaceful without the grazing herders in proper rows. He ventured into the forests in search of the sheep so that he might sleep, and his wish was granted upon a soft and damp stone where he lay his head a few hours after searching earnestly. When he awoke, a spot in the overhead foliage exposed his young eyes to the sun all too quickly, and the morning sight erased the memory of the night before or any night or day before. He quietly and politely cursed the sun in a way only young boys can do, and headed West in search of an answer to his confusion. No one knows what became of the boy, but he never returned to his mother and father. His mother was martyred for her efforts a short 4 years later, and buried under the floorboards." He breathed that little gulp that came with every ending.

She was asleep, head still propped up as if to view Silias Parkway upon awakening to a cruel world of hospitals and sleepless sleepers.

Irony and sleep share a surname, he whispered into the moon on the night of June 2. Dream.

He joined the ranks of the sleepless that night and felt that his deed had been done. When he stumbled up the elevator into her room the next morning, he took a seat next to her and studied Silias Parkway.

"The children are no longer in school, love. They got out yesterday, and now they're all down at the pier and behind the view. You wouldn't be able to see them anyway. You wouldn't like it anyway. Not here, love."

He crept silently to the threshold of the white room a good three hours later, but stopped as if he had forgotten something. The nurses down the hall halted in the moment with him, and even the cricket symphony politely muted the tenors as he turn on one heel and said, "Yesterday was Waltz in A Major, Alexander Gretchaninoff. Today would have been Etude in C Major, Stephen Heller."

Silias Parkway smiled in response.

Narcolepsy Falls Asleep

To be continued when I return. I have a plot line, yes, a rather atypical "to-do" list of literature. I've never cared for those, but I suppose I would have forgotten all of my horrible ideas last night. Now I just remember my horrible ideas and can translate them into horrible literature. This plot lines seems a difficult one to take on... Much too somber, morphing iridescently with irony, and then into something of a sort of mixed symbols that are not even with my own accord. We'll see how I fare this feat.

Notes for Later [Saver]

The Pen

Continue

Why am I here and not there?

Why do I sleep in a comfortable bed at a comfortable temperature with blankets and music, and not in a gutter somewhere next to my dead colleague? Why was I born here, and not somewhere where I learn to just survive? Why do I complain about homework when others keep muted complaints about disease and death? Why am I not shot or killed or run over, but innocent people are? Why do I continue to wrong the world and add to its wrongness?

The people who have come before before me have placed me in this position. They've murdered and tortured and wept and died, and I ended up here. Now they're demanding an answer to all of the above, and I just don't know that answer.

When you look at the bigger picture, every word becomes but a speck on life's fairgrounds. I think I've stepped out of frame for too long, and I'm halfheartedly fighting my way back in.

I'll never be a good person.

I'll never be a good person.

Because I am distracted. They're throwing this shit at me and asking me to sit down and solve problems and I just want to solve the real problems. The ones that have no answers.

The mathematical formula to the delicate web of life.

A Question That Others Force Me To Live With

Why am I here and not there?

The Carred Egg

No abrogation is a good thing.

No... Well the daylight has faded already.

I must go. But I just can't wait 'til the future gets here.

Wait. Wait. A note.

So I think that it's odd how all the homeless live in the forests near my house. People look at them and think that they have a wasted life, just like people look at anyone and think "What a waste." What a waste... You can never really know what's inside their head, and I believe you can create your own heaven or hell on Earth. Depends on who you are. The mind is a powerful thing, and although it never colors a black and grey world, it can at least give you a POLA or Skylight lens. Right? That's the beautiful thing. Anyone can be anyone. We'll never know if the killer with the gun in his hand is truly a child, or if the man he has shot is truly a child, or if we are all just children of a greater purpose and thought process.

So that's why I'm quiet at the dinner table.

Organization is a Good Thing

I erased all of it. It was shit.

So I sit down at the piano, and I can't really organize anything into anything that is unique. I feel like I'm just sitting there, not to let my tongue LICK THE KEYS! But to just be there. In the hopes that one day, one sorry day, it will amount to something that I'll enjoy for greater than an hour.

The typer, the typer. And the Holga. The want!

The songs I write. Well, there are none. When I do... Oh, lord, I'll tell you. When I do... You watch out. I'll never admit it. Never admit such a thing!

Filling The Nothing With Nothing In A Way That We've Made More Room For The Nothingstuffs

So just the thought while passing on the highway on the way to get a passport (Oh the odd things the mind comes to term with while within glancing radius of glass-glance material, as I call the formerly referred to as: WINDOWS. I amble in my speech).

The somethingstuffs:

In a time much much earlier, when there was nothing at all. And to suppress the victory of the nothing at all, men created something. I like, as we all do, to call this something sought after yet once oh-so-attainable: "The Meaning of Life." Cheesy. Cliche. I know. And the somethingstuffs: the men would confer and converse in the visceral and vernacular of the current yet passed moments, and conclusions were reached! Lo! Behold! Aw hell: Lo AND Behold! Now let us hunt a muskrat.

That was it. They got it, by Jove and by Jove's muse as well! It was due to the nothing that the something was reached.

Supply into the story some 4 million years, shave or shade in 5 thousand or so? Ah the terms reached in THESE nothingstuffs time. For we filled that nothing with something that was really quite much of nothing. The somethingstuffs had grown tiresome and taciturn in expression, thus is born the nothingstuffs BEGUILED AS SOMETHINGSTUFFS! And we are all led down the shimmery, shanky path of the more exalted and hallelujahed nothingstuffs. But the earlier presented and somewhat accepted somethingstuffs are gone. Goodbye, somethingstuffs.

Now we are here. And we continue to misunderstand:

No one can find the meaning of life. They keep searching and searching and people keep adding in devices and buildings that will make us live some 50, some 70, some 100 long 365-day-filled terms! Here we are, in the midst of humanity, erecting immortality with a mere crane. It is unachievable. Do me no repercussions, but I fear that the second yet metaphorical Tower of Babel is in the process of being built, as it has for the past 4 million years passed. We keep it up, the supplies, the words, the everythingstuffs, to construct this glorious and invisible tower: reaching God in immortality, subconsciously rather mind you!-and yet we lose the larger window view. That it is unattainable.

Although, the cheesily monikered "Meaning of Life" is most certainly attainable. Easily. But the world is a black hole miles from Black Holes. What we fear--the loss of all, the loss of life, the loss, the loss, has driven us to a muted craze that seems not a craze at all. An avoidance of pain and contemplation. Yes we esteem ourselves as a creature of "not-this" habit, as I so readily admit I am as guilty as you to. I veer and I vile. This is not it. What was I saying? Ah yes.

So in effect, these nothingstuffs and just pushed us further back. In an attempt to reach truth, we substituted lying in the meanwhile while the truth was being put on hold, complete with the utterly despicable theme song of humanity (I call this tune--the laughter). Irony and lives and so heavily intertwined, even more so after this adaptation to the lies, that the two are as a coupled marriage pair: the vows cannot be broken by our human fingers, the cause of such grief and woe!

Woe! Woe! Woah...

It is done. Let it be done. Until it is undone, I will sit alone by my bedside in the 4 am's that my street neighbors regard as daylight (damn the nocturnal man of Earth), substituting my own perceived truths for my rightful spot in the dreary land of Nod.

You're the magic that holds the sky from the ground.

She ambled about the gravely grounds

Cigarette in hands

Hands in hair

Hair on fire, eyes on fire, life on fire for all I know, young miss.

You had a vein about you

In a way

Where you seemed to walk with someone,

yet next to you was only the Springwarmair.

That's all.

Perhaps a stroll with a cigarette is doing you good?

And the words fly off your lips,

The smoke does not choke for once,

I don't understand

Why you walk alone yet together

And you're alone yet

Give off the aire of being... unalone?

Just not lonely.

Just not alone.

(That was horrible.)

I Gave My Hands a Bubble Bath (Unabridged and Part II)

Then at the restaurant, (yes I was here, wasn't I?) I got all this food and it tasted great. I was quiet so I slipped off into the bathroom and felt the eyes of the potatoes on the plates of old men staring at me, and the walls were a little too green for my green tastes. I felt insane, so I washed my hands. But when I lifted them to a towel to dry, they still felt filthy. I felt filthy. And it was a feeling that didn't go away. Because I knew that when I walked out into that restaurant, every effing window would scream a symbol at me and every person and their words that dripped like chocolate bunnies in an oven, all of it, all of it, it wouldn't stop. As long as the Earth spins, so does my head. And I think my head will win this staring contest. But I dried my hands anyways, gave myself a choked smile in the dirty mirror and left the clean bathroom. The potatoes greeted me: "Hello, Amy!" "Creep!" I replied. You'd think they were pirates or something. I went back to the table and left and put on "Kylie from Connecticut."

KYYYYYLIE, IS CALLING, FROM CONNECTICUT! called Ben.

"Creep!" I replied. Damn you, you pirate. Over to the bank we drove. The bank was fun because it had lollipops and when I went to Quizno's the other day, I remember whenever I got pickles and that dude at the counter stared at me, I imagined in my head I was screaming "Fuck yeah pickles!" Like a freak. Maybe then they'd all go away. You know, if they thought I was obsessed with pickles and profanity.

So at the bank I got a lollipop and I looked at the trash can. It was ugly. There was a suspect woman with a suspect bag of money there, in a paper bag. Curious, I left. I was still nose-deep in thought and I know why I'll never drink: I'm already drunk. I'm already high. I'm already stoned. It just comes with being me... If you think that stuff is bad for you, just wait until you sit down and try to be "wise" at age 15 (almost 16). Then your brain will be fried, but not from loss of brain cells: from a gain! And then you'll grow up scarred, filming suburbia in your underpants and sprinkling the lawn with ketchup while you stay up making cakes with your husband at 4 am (now THAT is what I call the good life). So my brain is fried. I wonder if they have rehab for thinkaholics? Hmm. Investment.

Anyways, then we drove over to some building that reflected the cars passing behind me. I felt like I was watching a play where Ben (Songs for Silverman was on by this time-- I'd moved on from Ben Folds Five the album and Way to Normal) was the soundtrack to my car-watching. They all looked the same and none of them revealed any faces or anything; for all I know, they could have just been ghost cars floating along to Hell. I don't really know. Does anyone? And they didn't see me at all. I was just some girl blasting "Gracie" and laughing and sitting with her feet up. Oh, well. I sat there for a while and just enjoyed music. The way life should be (plus the ketchup on yards and stuff you know!). Heading home, I was nodding off and I went up to my room. I played Way to Normal (Hey, do you think I've referenced Ben Folds enough in this entry or what?) at least 3 times and dreamt of Kylie. Kylie, Kylie. And Cologne.

Before Cologne and Cologne make me so sad. I mean, come on... It's about a divorce. I guess "Bitch Went Nuts" is a little less tender. And "Errant Dog." Then I opened the window and just looked outside for who knows how long. Observing the street that will one day miss me. I'll miss him. I miss all them. I missed the past and the future all in the moment.

Well, later I made a cake.

Well, later I listened to Regina Spektor.

And I know... You know how you know when you're famous?

People making a YouTube video of one of your songs played backwards. Then, my friend, you are famous.

Now it's some time of night and I have to go upstairs. And eat something.

And put a warm sock on my face, but we all have our ailments and idiosyncrasies.

I Gave My Hands a Bubble Bath

So I went to the salon and I sat in a warm chair and read magazines, and from all of the faces stared back at me the same thing: a beautiful face, full lips, green or blue eyes, and a whole mess of nothing else. The words all kind-of said something but then they didn't. I tried to understand them but they were written for someone else, someone who'd understand the native tongue of the dead. That is not I. So I cracked upon a Bukowski book and read it there in the salon while young ladies in tight clothes complimented my dress and "where'd you get it." I gave them all a tight smile, and leaned back a little further. I felt out of place... I didn't belong in there... All those girls doing the hair and the color, they belonged there and at parties or somewhere else where they could wrinkle their brows at the likes of me. And me? I belonged alone in my room, slowly slow-cooking my mind with the assistance of scrambled verse and piano riffs. And pounding out obscene lyrics that the piano can induce and then chopping down the smooth, smooth silk of a triad, escalating down to sing of Magic and Moons and Dead People Trading Places With ANGELS. There's my place, and I belonged there so I just gave them a tight smile. The smell of baked hair and product caused me to nod off and nod off, but I didn't because that was the point. I had to stay awake and hold down the fort to remain paranoid and fill my head with a continual deluge of shit and think about Life. It was nice, but it exhausted me.

Next on the to-do list: Barnes and Noble it is! I went in there and I walked right up those escalators and right up to the man with a beard and requested some Ben Folds. He herded me over to the F section (of course...) and walked away carelessly. I figured he was a very nice man. Purchased the CDs, and headed back to the car and blasted "Bitch Went Nuts." Odd odd the way people are about their personal life. I wonder if that song was written about me if I'd laugh or feel upset. Probably both, since it usually seems to work that way and I just don't say it. Then I figured something out... It's really hard to be happy and be wise. Wise and happy. They don't go together. You get one or the other: the burden of thought on the wise man, and he's not happy because he's constantly thinking and thinking. And the happy person just kind-of lives like a bee that kills the flowers but he is so happy because he doesn't stop to look back on the dead flowers he left behind. Oh, well, bugger. Things die everyday. Some baby is being born in Japan right now to replace her, don't you worry!

Then in the restaurant,

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