You cannot escape truth when talking across a pillow. Delirious comfort leaves no space for fear. If there was a banking system for time, an exchange rate for moments, for getting back what we've lost, I would invest all these empty hours I bleed out introspectively on the page for one morning spent volleying whispered… Continue reading Pillow Talk
Tag: memory
Talking in My REM Sleep
In another life and with another brain I would have made myself pupil and master of language. Instead: I tiptoe on the precipices of residual memories that spill out from suppressed synapses. I desire nothing but the nine-minute intervals between hushing the waking bells I've fooled my mind the night before into believing will penetrate… Continue reading Talking in My REM Sleep
Memory Wormhole (An Opening)
The falsities I signify as memories lie in stacked planes, pierced by a needle, threaded taut at the most peculiar points; each day is an involuntary setting off of previously lived remembrances, bounded in touchstones I’ve symbolically mythologized in my psyche. One past moment bounds into another: full submersion in a wormhole of past occurring… Continue reading Memory Wormhole (An Opening)
Top Score
Whenever I would get to see you, when it was our time, I felt I was stepping up to the challenge of an arcade pinball machine. Feeling below the cabinet for that hidden power switch, I’d seek you out. Reaching into my coat pocket for my busted burner phone and punching in the sequence of… Continue reading Top Score
Temperance of Permanence
She met him when neither of them could stand to be alone. They remedied this by getting together. Now they’re face to face and he’s trying to tell her how now he can’t seem to be with anyone. The tightrope walk between being available and being alone is an act he’s made his own. Acrobats… Continue reading Temperance of Permanence
Cinematic
It is a little-known fact that when you look at the back of a movie poster you see a mirror image of the picture on the front. The same goes for how the images look when you stand behind the movie screen itself. Spend enough time in the seats of a cinema, and you will… Continue reading Cinematic
Middleton
Middle age endows its members with, amongst strands of grey, bushels of gifts. Most are neglected, others embraced, but none must go unnoticed. Years accumulate, begging the excavation of long-buried relics—memories tucked under blankets of time. Unlike meticulously dusted deposits of Jurassic carbon, the artifacts of days past have a tendency to uproot hurriedly from… Continue reading Middleton
Overcrowded Consciousness
You lay down just past dusk, your back on a forest floor. You are surrounded by tall trees. Eyes are open, skyward. You listen. Before long, you become aware of a warm, static humming originating from the recess of your mind. Concentrating on the hum, you realize a mash-up of songs you have memorized, rendered… Continue reading Overcrowded Consciousness
Undeveloped Film
When you take a picture, be aware of what it leaves. In the years before taking a picture was as simple as pulling a thin, rectangular device out of your pocket and tapping a certain spot on its glass, people would buy these little plastic cylinders that housed this stuff called film. Those canisters were… Continue reading Undeveloped Film
Four/Twenty-seven
The woman who has just taken the empty seat next to me wears the same fragrance I have been programmed to tie to you. I, for a moment, forget where I am, forget who I am, and mesh again as the being we formerly referred to as Us. These senses take command and they tell… Continue reading Four/Twenty-seven
Attic
All day I have been hearing jazz faintly playing in my room. It does not seep through the wall nor does it rise from the chambers below. The riffs are generated within my mind. My ears glimpse phantom sound waves—unseen, invisible. Their nonexistence will startle me any longer. For I am a music box of… Continue reading Attic
Depressive Tempests
“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.” - William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness It is never so simple to say, “listen here, this is an exact depiction of mental illness,” as is it not simply the case in… Continue reading Depressive Tempests
Willow Creek
I remember when Stacy and I would go down to Willow Creek to skip rocks. I’d get mine all the way across; hers would only travel about half the way before descending out of view. “No one’ll ever try to skip that one again,” I’d say as the stone tucked itself in to the muddy… Continue reading Willow Creek
Recognizing Strangers
Today, on the shuttle that serves as the ankle on the last leg of my morning commute, the one that goes from the subway to the office, I saw this girl I know. She wasn't on the shuttle bus. She was driving a small SUV next to it. My window seat pulled up next to… Continue reading Recognizing Strangers
