another book that felt like a dream was a borrowed book from the library called kaleidoscope by brian selznick. i didn’t finish it because it was so enigmatic to me in writing style that i couldn’t understand what was going on. something about planets and moving to new worlds. i didn’t know who was talking, but they had a bond with this boy named james. from what i could barely comprehend, it felt like a fusion of peter pan and the little prince. but it was less of what was happening and more of how it made me feel, and i felt like a hollow blue dawn that the sun would never wake up from.

it’s probably one of the first times i’ve experienced such a feeling. i was thirteen when i borrowed the book, just right before the pandemic hit. it was so odd, so beautiful, so sad. a newfound sadness with the ink of a typical sharpie, when all my life i’ve known that emotion in dry-erase. by the way, im a total harbinger of dry-erase smears, only this time there’s this curious smudge that no longer goes with friction.

over the years, i noticed that i’ve graduated from those dry-erase smears. the new stains don’t leave. and every time i cross the ocean, every time the hollow blue skies swim in my eyes, such feeling always finds me.

there was this book i used to read as a kid, and i most definitely read this before i turned 10 because my memories had become so hazy about it, and it took the entirety of my teenage years trying to recall the title. i am so serious. i thought about that book every twice a year maybe. i knew it was real.

some book with a lighthouse on the cover, and a young boy is the main character, and he befriends a redhead named penny, and together they uncover secrets and mysteries. they ride this boat. i think they enter a cave at some point. they meet this strange old person who owns a clock shop. i don’t recall how it ends. but i loved it so much because it still stuck to me after all these years.

it wasn’t so long since AI wasn’t a major integration into our search engines yet, and for every time i tried to look it up, i’d always just get to the lighthouse by virginia woolf in my results. but young me was sure she had never met a virgnia woolf in her scope of fiction. i faced this minor disheartenment for all those years.

and then i had my annual reminiscence of that book just recently. i knew i remembered enough details, and so i recounted everything, with my whole heart to chatgpt.

i finally got it.

it was called the secret keepers by trenton lee stewart. and i also just find out he was the author of the mysterious benedict society

i literally jumped for joy like all those years have worn off my back. seeing the cover art again, tracing back to the storyline. i just had unexplainable fondness for it

(I)

the man cradles me in a war-waging world

that strung the sound produced

by his veins pulled taut

which he knows the count of, and when i play something

i like, he speaks of the pony-tail girls

my mother never conceived, or never was

--for daddy

(II)

the man dreams of the pony-tail girls

like white mares, brazenly galloping

pearly bodies stained, neighing with glee

and i am able to understand their beauty, for after all, i am a girl

who adores women

who adores the woman

who wouldn't trade her for the man and his bulging eyes.

--for the man and his ideals

(III)

but i believe in the love my father has

in those bulging eyes

for the woman

i resemble at times

an envy, to me

and the millennial girls

she lacks what i lack

but is what, in me

those bulging eyes yearn to find

--for the man that dreams to change me for God

(IV)

he who used to cradle me

one day, dropped me to the floor

the imprint of a whip to dress me in blows of change furthermore

once upon a time, i dreamt

that i was a pearly body

but i woke up, rose colored

of erasures that confused me

--for the man that whisked me from my storybooks

(V)

my head flows river brown,

fervent in my frills and white laces

was i a freer fellow of nature? or a parasitic rose

dependent on such to conjure stillness

as he witnessed this, my father

called for the pony-tail girl

while i dreamt i was an ornament

with my joys, i hang lifelessly

as for my father, that i was

figuratively

--i, as the irk of said man

(VI)

i long believed all princes dreamt of

pony-tail girls,

but i presented hair river brown

and the belief was a broken curse

once, i was a butterfly

my father taught me to roar

but when i did, he feared for the princes

who would run from me as i soared

--for romeo

(VII)

happiness came with a price

and so i understood

why i fail to neigh with glee

like the pony-tail girls could.

--for the girl dreaming on a stream behind her old house, maroon staining her dress

every corner of Wanju County was an eye. Watching them, if not absorbing every mutual glance, every brush of their fingertips. Whispering, passing messages of an immoral romantic collision from one head to another. Jeno's summer nights have never been so... discomforting. Agitating, but at the same time hypnotizing. His chest was all mushed up inside. He's never wanted so much to be out of this town. This town which he had longed to be a part of growing up because summers were easily his most favorite holiday. But the blue-haired boy had changed the whole trajectory of his life in a single moment, and many moments after that. Anything blue was Na Jaemin. He was in the sky, in the ocean, in peaches and dilapidated houses. Jeno was falling apart into all their obscure little corners, and it was so simple for Jaemin to split him in pieces that all pathetically begged for him. That coveted him.

when you were in mine

i cared about the little things

just to say them

just to talk to you

now i don't see them

not anymore

so there's nothing to say

except the same little things

There were multiple key holes. This place was incomprehensible. She was searching for the one she knew, the one with a shape as familiar to her as the back of her hand. Her vision was black. It drove her crazy to live in a moment of void for more than five minutes. She wasn't particularly dying where she was. There was no time limit, and her life wasn't at stake. But she was lost, and that feeling alone was like a warning for Consequences. She searched over and over again.

She didn't have a key, no. And yet she was still searching, like unlocking something was her obligation, and that she must get through a door before a Consequence comes and gets her. She was a Dreamer, for goodness' sake! Aren't Dreamers supposed to be able to see in the dark? Maybe she didn't know what that meant, but she had thought it impractical for peoples alike herself to calculate, to search for a fixed principle that could get her out, like the Scientists would.

He was evanescing from her. Always the same sob story that happened across the lonely street of her old house. Whilst everything kept fading, she tried with all her might to keep it clear. To keep it from vanishing. Damn he, but most of all, damn herself. She belonged there, in his arms. But in the world she came from, she had to make sure she was still of conscious existence. She dreamt of blue eyes, of fingertips caressing her shoulder, of fireflies and quiet streams and bruised ankles on rough stone.

She was back. She loved him when he loved her, and she believed it. She was the happiest girl on earth.

it felt like it had been the hundredth afternoon our knees swam through needlegrass,

and the hundredth we've danced on the barrels and bridges of your memories

they have not been trapped in your mind's territory which i have trampled upon

but are at large amongst the nature which i associate with my body, mind, and swollen heart

and more unsaid, written on the leaves, engraved on the timeless bodies of trees

concealed by mellow talk and laughter

vanilla diet coke, for

freedom is expensive, and

my condescending majesties say

most freedoms are calories, while

in their bloodstreams flow gasoline, and

their heavenly bodies

a forty-nine

you're ill when

you take a bite,

says the majesty

look,

she says, and

shows me her wrists

i don't have lines because

beauty is coded in my mind

with a pea on her tongue

she parts with her limbs not touching, and

leaves me alone, with

I knew we had everything we needed in place. His favorite record spun on the player, my drawings of him stowed in a vault box whose life depended on luck, and ourselves beneath the sheets. His eyes were so achingly pretty when they were shut, but lusciously brown when they opened. He'll never open them again, but all I had to do was think of them.

He told me once that if I dreamt of him, it meant that he was thinking of me. I used to laugh at how inane people were for coming up with psychological myths, and now I'm wishing on the stars falling on us that when I think of him, just as I do now, he would see me in his dreams as he slept. 

We never said goodbye. We didn't have to. It was just like how we never said hello. We found ourselves when we needed each other, however spontaneous his entrance was in my short life. 

The chips of the ceiling falling from above came like tiny pellets of rain. When the earth shook us, I inched closer to his heart so that it was the only thing I could hear. I matched my heartbeats with his, content with how untroubled and sound it was. 

Then came the scorching heat. It was like summer, the first and only season I'll have him on this dying planet.

was an abstract that

alluded to something

beyond comparison to my reveries

until a fraction of my innermost

existence, my indefinite actualities

have been severed

we were a bottomless ocean and

our sailors pursue a search

a penetration of sea to earth

heart to heart and

word for word

earthly magnets swing the

compass to time where the

sailors go back

with seafloors forever a

product of dreams gone black, and

the oceans of indefinite actualities

severed through the

tell me that i should go now

---

why aren't you saying anything?

because i don't want to just yet

you are happy

how could you say that?

because i believe it

i always have

and i've become the most sorry in

my life to have stolen your

familiar place

not quite what it was

but how it had felt

she finds him with his friends

just as he was

for this was the only one she knew

hey

she approaches him

i've missed you

she exclaims hoping

he would receive it

with humor

as would he a long time friend

bewildered he returns it

nonetheless with a smile

and suddenly she is aware

and puts a palm to her mouth

excuse my tongue,

she searches

for her successor

you must have someone

and she is silenced

by a crease in his brow

no

in three words a breath

sweeps her off her feet

yearning was over

by a swift embrace

by a collision so tumultuous

gravitational in an inward

collapse right where she fit

long ago

but there were stars blinking at them

that wanted a piece of the force

they've witnessed in the space

not here, she says

let us take this somewhere else

she ascends the stairs in a

familiar place

just as it was

and how it had felt

to return

i'd rather the world ended here

before i have to leave

she mutters against

his pale shoulders

so that i'd no longer have another memory

of parting from you

so tell me

tell me all the things you want to do

i want to hear it

the things you love