Died Disappointed?

Somebody has drawn you, thought you up. But you've never met. The Old Masters used to say nothing was drawn by looking. Just feeling, thinking, eyes closed. I've spent nights wandering the blue halls of this empty, smoldering palace, not looking, just dreaming. It's summer again—a month more in the country of your acquaintance. Can we go back?

I was just a little bacon grabber. A goldfish with a secret. It was after a summer of no sleep...who's there...fluffy shadow. And what does it mean you've procured the one undedicated bench in this town to sit on? I've learned this the hard way. It's better to unquenchably yearn than to be unquestionably dead.

My dog, Chopin, calls me on the phone. Don't forget the spaghetti, he says. Life is a series of being reminded. They made a movie about this once. Lambasted in its day, but subsequently praised. We need the fresh, soft eyes of youth. Oh I could just lie down on the rug all night and lament. But there's dinner to do, and if we're lucky, a soul-reviving dessert. Midnight treats. Dreams like flambé. Chopin says we've been here for many years as he drifts off to another sleep, next to his favorite humping toy.

I was—and still am!—bold and beautiful and fat and lazy. Driving my mail truck around autumnal Pennsylvania. I'd wake up in early morning mists, like dancing out of someone else's dreams. Take my hand. I'm alive!

In the dark, nothing conventional will do. It's better to be shameless, slippery, and hard. Don't worry, someone out there will understand you. Someone in Ithaca, perhaps. Someone in Erie, maybe. Colors we can never see are arranging themselves onto a canvas in a dark room to create another masterpiece. What dream did I find you in? In what dream did I lose you?

Can I wreck you with my divine, psychotic visions? Or simply recite to you some post-apocalyptic verse from my daydreams? I wish to live on an island with just a cow. That's it. A single wave rolling in in the evenings. Angels hiding in the clouds. Is there not somebody out there who can stop me from keeping up this charade? Some have tried, all have failed, but that doesn't mean I don't love them still. I could never love a successful person.

After you was only long, meandering evenings in the rain. An obtuse symbol invented only to vex. Dreams that felt like bruises in the night. I never wanted any of this, but like a book that falls off the shelf by supernatural means and reveals the page you've been searching for all your life, it came to me. It's all reminded me I'm not in control. But that's how all of this works.

At night, she'd walk around in her basement, completely nude. This was an approximation of the feeling she woke up with. Often, she dreamed she had divulged something very important and personal to her bosses, of which she had many at work. A deep, shameful secret. They kept it in her file, to be used against her at a later point if needed—which aroused her greatly, mysteriously, and eternally.

It was the movie Twister. Or no, the game Twister. Childhood doesn't just happen. It's plotted out—vindictive and vicious. Napoleonic, Attila-esque. This is why I can't pretend this is just another eternal afternoon. At some point, a fever has to take hold. That brutal throbbing. Gelatinous, chittering throbbing. In my dream I handed over all my juvenilia to you. You were in possession of all my mistakes, errors, flubs. You were the guardian of all this. Take it from me. Make an empire out of it. I am your faithful peasant.

Some tree was trying to be me. It nearly stole my life. I write this as a warning. You start seeing leaves everywhere where they shouldn't be. Bramble in the bed. Pure, obscene sunlight in your dreams—as if your eyes are wide open all night. It hurts to realize. Your life doesn't have to mean something. Sometimes it can just all add up, silently across the years, to nothing.

I was born with a giddy sense of unraveling. I was born with a clipped wing. But I was born. Don't you remember me telling you on those autumnal drives around town after work? It used to get darker later in summer, the days long-dissolving into nights, but now it's just like someone flipping a switch. And the smell of sunscreen or coconut in your dream. Is somebody cooking while I write this? Who is in their living room, sipping from their cup, the rain miles away traveling slowly toward them, but they would never know? All this to say, I think it is perfectly fine and natural to let loose the violent macaque of your most private and dark desires...

I just want to be mean and lazy and frivolous today. The summer heat silts over everything, giving it a fresh, glistening gleam. Grandpa Joe, frail and stained, snores like a Ford in his chair. We've gotten it all wrong—dreams work in reverse. The truth is, no squirrel ever really finds its nuts again. After all, a fine, sturdy, and productive life is built out of subtractions...

Heatwave moving in like a dream. Unsure if it's breakfast or time to nap. Someone has left the television on in the next room. Its secrets scatter through the home. You've fallen asleep, bottomless except for pale blue socks, on the settee. I stand at the screen door—audience to the bats that dance through the evening air, making a fevered empire out of the sky...

It's not summer anymore. It's not urgent. Let's slug about. Let's be slugs together. Ooze with me in the night. I was never understood, but that didn't stop me from being silly. In my dream, sweltering and slavering, I searched for the tombstone of the famous writer in the city, but there was nothing there—just green fields bouffant with blooming and blossoming—because nobody had ever died.

It's summer—which means let's get pasteled, let's get positively urgent! Let's get stuff done! Wahoo! There is too much mail to go through—just tell me which is from you, so I can kiss it, hold it, never open it, just imagine what's in there. I had a dream we waded through a jungle swamp to find the right book. It was a book you said you had meant to give me years earlier. I would understand everything then.

All I ever wanted to be when I grew up was the detective who finds himself in too deep, his life unraveling, sleepless, haggard. He gets calls in the middle of the night that are just heavy breathing. He's so close to cracking the case. To solving the long, drawn-out, and thus far unsolved murders. But then he falls in love.

Back then, they'd cut the front part of the head off a bee to see if it would still fly to a flower to feed. Are you okay? Can you describe what's happened to you? Don't worry—someone else will. You'll be looking out the window on a morning in summer and wondering how to get out there, and behind you will be someone else, wondering how long it will take you die.