I rise with a certain reluctance. These days, I’m rarely excited by the prospect of another day. I wake aching for a touch of life. I look to my journal and surrender to the feeling that I exist, but only just.
“Lately,” I write, “I feel that my dreams have morphed into caustic parodies. Nightly illusions of desire, steeped in derision. I sicken myself.”
The pen slips from my hand. I crumble the page and hurl the cursed, empty notebook against the wall. It falls pathetically into my laundry basket.
What am I doing? What a futile thing it is to write without pleasure or purpose. I’ve never written a single thing and enjoyed it.
It’s a cold Boston morning. I lie back down and give a half-hearted effort to go back to sleep. Quiet rebellion. A small victory.
Half in dream, I’m reminded of times when I tasted life. Secure in the arms of my first love, I felt the beat of her heart thumping beneath my cheek. Memories, I muse, mirror dreams. Bitter mockeries, they serve as reminders of a past that I never truly occupied. It is true however, that I catch your shadow on a stranger from time to time. Your whisper, in the soft lisp that follows an uncertain joke. A harsh pain: I should know you still.
Or the time my bare feet were first kissed by a frigid morning dew. Her, a cup of coffee and our cigarettes waiting for me back on the porch. And the birds, berating the sun for waking them too.
Each dawn brings an overdue confrontation. Unwanted reality. Unwanted reality. Unwanted reality. Stale existence. A life not worth mentioning, in the shape of a man that was never really there.
Where were you when you realized that that you were a Spector, dancing just beyond the edges of reality? You saw me. Amidst the worlds blindness, your gaze held.
I fall back asleep like a moth drawn towards the promise of a distant, forbidden warmth.