It’s a dream, this life. A dream of the morning, a half-awake dream. There is something more, something clearer and sharper and more real, but the heavy comfort of sleep prevents a full recognition and understanding of the real life just a step away. And so we live on the edge, on the brink of consciousness, too overcome by the fluffy, cottony dream world to care much about what there really is, what there is meant to be just beyond our waking (dreaming?) reality.
There is something so much more important beyond oneself. Those brief moments when I realize, “This is me, I am living and alive and doing these things.” What does it all mean? What is the point? There has to be a reason I survived. Those are moments of truth, and more than that, of hope. Hope for the future, that I will break out of the dream and accomplish something, realize something, do something. Something that is more important than the day-to-day antics we busy ourselves with and consider so important. They aren’t, really. What is important is the other being, the being that can only be channeled randomly, unexpectedly, saying, “This is me. I’m alive and I’m doing these things. Why? I should be…”
But then the channel ends, and there is only this dream world, and it’s too comforting, too suffocatingly soft to leave room for anything else. Maybe that’s all there is, after all. Maybe that’s all there’s meant to be.
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The words wouldn’t come anymore. They stuttered, faltered. Never the right word. Gone was the vocabulary, the vernacular; no living-walking-breathing dictionary. Not anymore. Writing was no longer an outlet for that which could never be expressed in spoken word. The brain-to-finger connection as faulty as that to the mouth, the vocal chords. Stutters, stops, painful pauses, disruptions. No clear thoughts nothing perfect anymore. So much to get out that it doesn’t know how to come. Fitful, fretful, in bursts. Not fluid. Gone are Flannery and James, no more to be found. Too much work writing, not enough for her. Words and thoughts like sloughed-off hair and soap scum and toothpaste down the bathroom sink. Rigid and dougy and clunky. Like play-doh or clay. Rigid, unbudging. Only blown out in chunks in unidentifiable shrapnel, word-shrapnel. Sharp and stinging and bludgeoning. No flowers or purple patches, just word shit. Use enough drain-o, write long enough, push out enough of the crap until the words start flowing more smoothly, with only a few chunks here and there a rush of words at once. But then more liquid, smooth, wet, words flowing out, just a few flakes here and there, nothing more of the rot and harried stabs at words that blocked the tunnel, the tube, that channel to the fingers. Finally, at last, the words flow smoothly, unobstructed, effortlessly. And once again the brain-world is right, and that is all that matters.
