There's this building that I remember and I don't know if it's real. It's a concrete shopfront made of painted white cinder-blocks; when facing at the left-side, might curve around to reveal an alley way. It's night in this memory and there are bright lights illuminating the front and the inside. The door is made of glass so that you can see in. It's part of a row of shops, like one might find in a larger city - the kind I haven't spent very much time in. I don't know if it's actually a shop. It could be a restaurant or a small DIY concert venue. I don't know if I have a memory of this building because I ever went inside of it or because I only saw it from the outside or if I ever truly saw it at all or if it's something that I imagined, but I can picture it vividly. I don't know what age I am in the picture in my mind. Everything feels distant and fuzzy like a memory from childhood but as I get older more and more of my old memories have that quality to them. I could've been a teenager. I could've been an adult. It could've been a dream.
If the cement storefront is from a dream, it is not a recent dream. It is something I have been remembering for a long time, which is why I think it's a memory. At the very least it is a memory of a dream. I don't know when I started remembering this. It feels like something I've always had with me. I don't know how often I've thought about it. I've only recently noticed that I was remembering it. Usually it will appear in the back of my mind as a sort of assumption, a baseline, the platonic ideal of this front of this type of venue. It goes unremarked upon by my conscious thoughts.
I've been making a point to remember when the building blocks of my thinking originated. A reference in a movie? A TV show? An inside joke between myself and someone I haven't spoken to in years? I've become fixated on holding onto these things. As I get older, there are finite walls around everything. If I don't remember this, if I don't think about this, if I don't track down it's origins, I might never think of it again. If I don't do something there's a chance that means I've done that for the last time. It is not a given that I will ever do things again. The window of potentials feels like it is closing around me everyday while I sit at home, walk the dog, work. Every second that I spend doing anything is time that I can't spend doing something else, which is overwhelming. There is simply too much for me to do and I can't do it all. There is so much that I don't even know how to triage. It is overwhelming and I feel guilty if I am resting, if I am not pursuing, if I am not tracking down this concrete storefront that might not have existed.
Concrete storefront is impossible to track down. If it existed, it doesn't exist today. If it was real ever, it was real in the 90s. Even if I could remember where it was, something different would be there now. It might have literally been demolished. Even if it wasn't, it will not contain the sense memories that I am trying to relive. And even if I could experience those sense memories, then what? They aren't important sense memories. What's important were the other feelings surrounding them, of being out in the world and not having the experiences that I now have. It doesn't exist and there's no way to get there. There is nothing to be done about it.
I take for granted a self-actualized future full of rows of this storefront over and over again. I can smell whatever is inside. I am out in the world. It is night. The wind is blowing hard, like it is the night that I am writing this. I don't know when it's going to be and I am not making plans for that to ever be the case. I am scared that i will never be out in the world. I have work to do. I have to walk the dog. My car won't start. Repeat this for years. I still imagine myself as a being out in the world and I'm scared. A memory transmuted into a dream. Now it will be transmuted again into a memory of myself writing about the memory transmuted into the dream. Because nothing is real. I am floating, nauseously, helplessly, lonely. I can't appreciate what I have. I keep floating past it.
This doesn't count. One day, something will count. And it will feel like the concrete building transmuted into a dream.
(cheers dude!) doors opening doors closing lift going up lift going down doors opening ground floor first floor second floor third floor fourth floor fifth floor sixth floor seventh floor eighth floor ninth floor tenth floor eleventh floor (x4)
One day, something will count. And it will feel like the concrete building transmuted into THE AMERICAN BISON.
