we are most alive in dreams

     I’ve deleted all of those albums we would listen to together, driving through the twisting and turning back roads of Pennsylvania, or laying in your parents bedroom.

     I’ve lost your phone number.

     I’ve thrown away all of the pictures you left at my house. The ones we took in the fall, all of those years ago. The golden browns and oranges playing off of your pale skin and freckled nose.

     I’ve donated all of the clothes you left strewn about my bedroom floor. Blouses with torn and broken buttons. Pants with walked-off hems.

     I’ve burned all of the letters we sent. Those pages and pages of tangible love curling at the ends and turning into ash, something equally tangible to something so intangible in my soul and heart. That sentence doesn’t give justice to the snakes that live in my guts, that toss and turn when I think of you.

     I’ve never done something like this.

     So I wanted to write you one last time, to ask you what it was like to be forgotten. But all remaining pieces of you have vanished and I can’t remember your name. It started with a letter and ended in catastrophe.

     If someday soon you find this and remember what it was like to sweat, don’t remember me. If you find this and remember what it was like to bleed, don’t remember me. If someday you find me and want to remember what it was like to be a giant, don’t remember me.

     Because I’ve never done something like this and I hope to forget about it one day.

     Late morning. Breakfast. A hangover looms slightly overhead and the coffee pots give me subtle winks and come hither twisting fingers. Two aspirin hit my tongue and my empty stomach begins to wretch.

     I tell myself to keep it together but all I want is fresh air. No tables available outside. The sorority girls occupy the sidewalk. Coffee and bagels at a full service breakfast cafe. I shake my head and blow smoke into their confident circle. Hoping they sneer and wave their hands in front of their faces. Contort their features and make sure I hear them cough and gag and wheeze.

     And I am content being their topic of conversation, because their shrill voices carry through the windows and they keep pointing and sneering. And my attitude becomes aggressive as the dark roast runs dry. I pull the waitress aside and kindly ask her to poison the food so some peace and quiet can be enjoyed by the survivors.

     She asks me, calm faced, “Is it a strong drink or will they writhe and moan all over the floor? It would be quite a mess to clean up. Their guts would stink and I have a headache.”

     The ring she wears on her left hand is enough to keep my tongue still, but her eyes ask for keys to the handcuffs of a day job. The thirst for adventure. So I hand her the vial stashed away in my back pocket, and the screams from outside only last for a few moments before we slip out the back door and the sun shines, keeping the clouds away.

     People don’t bother me. It’s their complexity that sits me on edge. Always looking between every word they say, to find the origin and the true meaning behind them. It’s a quiet obsession. A subtle confinement that I linger on when my feet finally rest and my head can focus on one thing at a time.

     It’s unhealthy, and I recognize that. My heartbeat thumps inside my ears and my shrinking stomach turns into knots. Making lists of possible motives and goals that others have set beyond me. I am only a way-point. A tangent within a series of events that will lead them somewhere better than a room that holds my voice.

     And everyone I’ve ever known has ended up as a page in my notebook. Some have more pages than others. Some have their own notebooks. A shrine dedicated to them. Where I can sacrifice their limbs and their organs to some greater good.

     A greater good that no longer cares about the written word. So my effort seems futile and irrelevant. The hours I spend thinking and writing is just a waste of the only talent I have.

     So I wonder about the people I’ve met. If they’ve achieved their goals and if they smile more than they used to. If they have forgotten me and who their parasitic incisors are attached to now.

     We all feed off of each other.
     A nation of leeches.
     We’re all used and forgotten.

     H would jump into my arms every Friday night. I would make the long drive after work, stopping only to get gas and clean the smashed bugs from my windshield.

     East coast summers are hot and I’ve never owned a car with air conditioning. The humid air would pour in through my windows and I could feel the heat coming off the road as I hung my arm into the wind, always trying to push the gas pedal further into the floorboard.

     She would wait on her front porch and run down through the front yard towards me, pushing her lips against mine. I would lift her up, and the laugh I remember so well would echo against the trees.

     We would go inside and sit in her kitchen, keeping the radio low.

     “Are you hungry?”
     “No, I don’t think so.”
     “How was work?”
     “It was alright. Slow. And hot.”
     “Wanna take a shower?”

     H’s eyes would light up and the corners of her mouth would crease, already starting to take her clothes off and lead me up the stairs. We would leave the door open, letting the steam coat the carpet and our bread crumb trail of clothes leading to the cold tile.

     I would stand behind her and run my fingers through her long strawberry blond hair. She would turn and lean her head against my chest, letting the hot water turn her spine red.

     H would lay naked next to her bedroom window, her skin becoming tight and covered in goosebumps. We would make love and her muscles would tense, nails digging into my back before our exhausted bodies would lay in heaps on the love seat or at the foot of her bed.

     Sleep always came just before dawn and always after her. I made sure of it, and she would sing me to sleep with her soprano voice laying low against the arrival of sunrise.

     I write about people just enough to feel human. To feel as though I belong to something bigger than myself. To pretend I know the dirty little secrets that everyone keeps stitched in the lining of their skin.

     But maybe we all read our own press too much. Or don’t press enough. Don’t squeeze and hold on to the things that matter the most, letting them slip through our fingers like snakes between chicken wire.

     And I guess to have a destiny is to never know where the road ends. When to let it put us to sleep and drift into oncoming traffic, hoping at least one person is paying attention.

     The drugs have taken hold of my veins and I want to sleep but I know this rabbit hole will take me deeper into something I haven’t grasped yet. Something I can’t see because my tongue won’t reach out further than my nose.

     Taking time off from a notebook or a keyboard has my head tangled. Like someone at the phone company crossed the lines and I keep getting connected to a foreign tongued national and security is pounding on my door while I have one foot out the window, trying desperately to make contact with someone other than the voices inside my head.

     If I take the plunge and let the cold waters of the Atlantic grip my ribs, the tide will surely carry me to places that no one knows about. The kind of places that only exist when we aren’t looking.

     And the crystal champagne glasses holding our futures are almost pitch perfect. They are always a little sharp or a little flat. So we keep sipping and then refilling, hoping to find middle C amongst a sea of noise.

      I found all of the small notes she left on random pages in my notebooks. The ones she hoped I would find while our hearts beat at the same pace. While our blood and sweat came together, making painters across the world faint.

      I found them all and put them in a pile along with the book of things I wrote for her. Things I wrote for her, while she was telling me that I didn’t write about her enough and that she could never be as beautiful as all the others that peppered the pages of my memory.

      She took the part of my life that I loved the most and turned it into something I hated. Something that made me feel guilty for creating things that never existed, and never will. The words that I used to write, stopped growing. They ceased to exist as I tried my hardest to write about her and only her.

      I can’t think of another human being that had their own book written by my hand.

But her selfish and impatient nature made it something mandatory and forced. Something I couldn’t feel or see or even have. Writing words about El would never be good enough, no matter how much blood I mixed with the ink.

      So I took the pile of her notes and the book she would never read and I burned it in my backyard. Under the maple tree that reminded me of her. Because the leaves would go pink and orange and purple and amber during autumn, reminding me what it was like to sit under something so beautiful and impossible to define.

      I hope the ashes sink into the roots and rot the tree from the inside, just like she did to me.

     She is drunk again. Sloshing this way and that, against lamp posts and trash cans while beer bottles crash in far off alleyways. Her heels click forever on empty streets.

     She is talking to herself again. “I miss my home town,” she whispers.

     It’s a far away place, now. Long dead in memories forgotten. Picket fences don’t look as white here. The paperboys aren’t as cute. She tells me these sorts of things when she only thinks I’m not listening.

     A taxi drives by, headlights catching high ankles and her voice thickens, “I miss the smell and the feel of the summer time.” Oklahoma. Where the pavement would get hot enough to melt cotton.

     A hiccup and the snapping of a heel. She takes them off and tosses them onto two sets of train tracks. The man in the corner store is peeking through the blinds. Her blond hair ignites in the overwhelming fluorescence, bare feet scrape against concrete and that skirt gets a little higher around the thighs. I try to take her arm but she pushes me off and gives me a dirty look. Like puddle water or unwashed coffee cups.

     She is rambling again, “I miss waking up and finding myself drowning in my own sweat, the fan in the corner, covered in dust, trying its best to keep me cool while I sleep.”

     Two cops are walking her direction on the other side of the street. One is smoking a cigarette and the other has a limp. One more block and three flights of stairs to escape their stares. They slow and watch her attempt to fake composure.

     A fumbling of keys, one deadbolt thrown and then, “I never liked clothes and sleeping naked was something I always tried to avoid, but when summer hit, I hardly ever did laundry.” Bare feet on dirt roads. Letters written on front porches. Lemonade ice cubes against pouting lips.

     Lonely plants beg for water but all they get is a tall glass of ignorance. Her feet slap on the hardwood floor and hands nimbly remove clothes, one button at a time until those hands are just slipping along bare hips and lonely collarbones.

     An empty bed holds her curves. Walls grow eyes and they watch her slink under the covers.

     “Please ask me if I could come home.” I don’t say anything.

     And here I sit, on the edge of the bed waiting for my cue to get the trashcan and a gallon of water. Her eyes flicker and she is already dreaming and I wonder if she will tell me about them in the morning.

     If I’m even here.