of_providence @ 2008-05-21T12:42:00

2038-01-19T03:14:07Z

written for my independent study on memoir writing.

Fourteen Seconds

I.
I want you to need me. I want you to tell me things you believe I cannot understand. I want you to know I don’t ever want to be not here. Always.

II.
It is always at 3am, never later, when I am deep in the nightmares, still believing in their realness, and find myself clinging to my pillow, as if the clinging could seal their permanence. I am wet, caked to my sheets with oil, sweat, and threats of semen, and my mouth is ajar, always, and crusted with jellied memories of drool and snot. I can see things, though, hidden among the sinewy lightshow behind my eyes, rusted shut with swollen skin. People surface in and out of my half-sleep, strung together with neon threads of my own imagination. I can see things, always with effortless clarity, in colors I cannot ever reconstruct.

III.
I drift into unexplored places underneath the sheets, my legs sliding out of the warmth of knowing and into cold places—icy, unexplored countries of bed sheets, the off-limit territories of sleep. I find places that hurt—hurt in ways that real things hurt—logical, awake things—like the hot pain of a freshly skinned knee or the throbbing ache of very, very bad news. Each image and successive non-image of my sleep is peopled with graininess, memory, and things I swore to myself were dead, but aren’t. They never are.

IV.
My grandmother, whose voice I haven’t heard in months, is pink, violet, and trembling, clutching a drink in her hands like a prize. She walks in my dreams with lucidness and ease, something I can hardly remember. It is now, only in darkness, that I can take refuge in her, have faith in her outrageous lies and in believe in her own sense of reality more dreamlike than mine, one that has an ebb and flow which few, if any, have understood. She propels herself forward with muffled, incongruous footfalls—thunk thunk—on a loop of ten or fifteen-minute intervals, repeating her words with the slow drip of molasses from a jar. I have written about her many times, tried to explore in metaphors and precise syntax her disastrous stories made out of whiskey and cheap beer in plastic steins; they’re never right. Grandma wins, though, every night that I see her in these dreamy incantations, and she disappears before I ever get to ask her if she remembers why or how she loves me, always.

V.
Mom is making me grilled cheese and tomato soup, its wet redness feathering out in thin rivulets into space. There is no smell, save for the low note of boxed wine and dollar store nail polish that mixes with the oily soup in the black air. Why is she here? Why do I feel her haunting me in the dark like she does during the day when we talk on the phone, the heaviness of trees, bodies of water, stretches of road, and the promise of static separating us? Is she with her son at 3am the way he is sometimes with his mother, floating in the split-second black spaces between eyelids and down feathers? Are we both together, tapping into both of our imaginations, meeting each other somewhere primal, hungry, and real? Are our dreams the only place where we live without memories of what the past twenty years have been, or are they more ruled by our past than the daylight hours? I don’t have the answer, I never will, because I have never known any of my mother’s dreams, spoken to her about her wild overnights of impossible travel or if I’m there with her when she becomes a girl again. I’ve never asked—how could I? I wonder, though, who she is, even as a ghost in my dreams. And I still feel that guilt, remorse, and that dull ache even in the afterimage of a nightmare.

VI.
And there are the teeth. Those, which I always see every night, turn to dust in my mouth and fall out of my head and into the air like soot, only yellow, sour. They reappear before me every 3am like clockwork, resurfacing in different incarnations. They bite at me ravenously, tear me apart into fragments, shattered pictures of loss and imagination. I dream of them with zeal and wonder like some children dream of candy or imaginary pets; the teeth come in rolling waves of bliss and torment, sometimes piling up around me and suffocating me, burying me alive—asleep—in their porcelain smell. No matter how many times I recreate them in daylight—with pencil, paint, or words—they always return, hungry and strange, and crumble, turning to dust long before sunrise.

VII.
What is this cycle of imagination, this endless ladder fashioned out of rotten teeth and red, swollen gums? What are these symbols of life, symbols of death, fragile threats of an overactive, muscled unconscious full of contradiction. What are these smells, these sounds, these ghosts of real things pooling together with mythic synesthesia? How can I refuse to be an archetype when all I feel are tens of thousands of things I’ve never lived to experience?

VIII.
Never, ever my father—he is never here, not at night, in darkness, under the cloak of hard work and excavation. What do I wish for during these several seconds of untold possibility? Are we on one of his magical sailboats like we were when I was six or seven, battling the treacherous currents of the Long Island Sound, and stopping to eat too wet sandwiches during lulls in the adventure? Or do I wish for anything at all? He has never been here, and not since those nights when I was ten or eleven, confused, wrong, and ashamed has he been here in the daylight either.

IX.
And Michael, the one I let get away too many times, has returned, differently this time, with more weight, vividness, and wisdom. Other men have come before him, all who have haunted me in different ways: Mark tore at my skin with his fingernails, told me I was too boyish while heaving his wild, beastly body into mine; Evan burned me with cigarettes and mocked my flaccid penis; and Justin, the whore who I never loved, still returns to tell me he believes that I create my own sadness. There were others, of course; nameless men who I refuse to believe were real people but figments, ghouls, lessons in what not to do, who not to be. They are all the bad memories, the inaccurate re-enactments of botched things, stalwart reminders of how I have failed. I have only had sex with one man in my life, but each of them have had their way with me in my sleep: dirty words, stinking mouths, contracting muscles—they are here every night, those filthy palimpsests.

X.
Michael, though, is a surprise, an apparition, a phantom in a long line of phantoms who I cannot, try as I might, shake from these nights. He is the older one, the one who always professed his simple love to me at inauspicious times when we were drunk or laying in bed with our new nakedness still stinking up the dark glow of the room. He is here though, suddenly, returning home to me under a pale green sky, cloudless and pinpricked with stars. He pulls me into him with his giant, elastic arms, and kisses me, sliding his tongue between my lips just enough for me to know none of it is real. I have spent eight months not thinking of him; I have not missed the hairlessness of his triceps, the meatiness of his thighs. I have slept two hundred times and never once dreamt of his innocuous, naïve laugh, his strong optimism toward his dead mother, or his two tattoos of expensive liquor seals, ironic, hollow, and unfunny; I still kissed them every time we were together. Tonight, though, he says things, things that I have never heard another man say, words that seeped out of his mouth in whispers—glowing and fragrant—things that I remember now sourly, knowing I should have believed him.

XI.
All of this, everything in the world, everything I have ever known, begins and ends in three seconds—four if I’m lucky. Reverie is a word that fools use, those who believe that dreams are long, epic masterpieces of our own invention, mysterious and grandiose. They are wrong. Dreams are not gifts; they are dangerous gibberish full of unwanted remembrance and seemingly dormant parts of the self. I did not know I was still in love, still afraid of my mother’s inevitable death, or still could recall how my grandmother breathes—slow, labored, emphysemic. That’s all we are: impatience at 3am, moonlessness, and impossible permutations of all that we had, all that we gave, and all that we never were.

XII.
I never believed it could curdle so fast.

XIII.
And then he is gone, just as they are all gone: my grandmother is senile, Mom’s tomato soup is dried up, smelling of mothballs and cigarettes, and the men, just as the teeth, pepper the air with their dust.

XIV.
Michael is down the street, just awake from a nightmare. His memories of me are quickly turning to salt.

but for lack of providence

of_providence @ 2008-05-21T12:42:00