#prolixity

prolixity: noun

"You don't understand," she said, "At some point or another, you're going to have to let the pain back in."

She was sitting next to me, practically enrobed

in the dunes, staring with concern, her gently burnt legs bare

and gritty with the white, white sand. We were maybe

ten feet from the boardwalk, and the sky was trying

to decide precisely what kind of blue or maybe grey

it was. This is a rich image, the kind that conjures

itself up out of conjectures

of fragments of memories, perhaps dreams that

I had long ago forgotten, those longing ones that are

imprecise and that I can't exactly articulate What it Is

I'm feeling. I think maybe it's just that I want to sit

on the sand next to a girl I can trust with all my heart

because she has sturdier hands than mine and wouldn't

love me any less for it, and maybe in that dream

i have sturdier hands, too, and maybe

that's why she's even talking to me or looking to me in the

first place. I think that some people call this type

of image a vision, but I can't see anything I can't see anything

I can't see anything in it, other than that it will probably

never come true, or if it does, I'll know what it means

even less or more than i do now, and it'll hurt all the worse

it'll hurt all the worst

things about it are:

one, the daze of gleaming fictionals

and the proximity of the unreal, held back by the

unyielding semi-permeable membrane of ____?

two, the propensity of the mind

to suffer for no cause other than

itself, and three, the very fact that

at some point or another, you're going to

have to let the pain back in so you can

understand what it means, the dream, i mean, i mean,

the pain, and grow for it, or away from it, or something.

last night, i had a dream that i had a little brother and that we ran away together into a dank-purple deepblue night, and i think we could have been running from and through a parking lot nearby a beach and a boardwalk somewhere, and my father pulled up to us in his red car wearing his dark glasses he rolled down his dark windows and asked when i was coming home again and i told him to give me more time, and he just shook his head silently and drove away and