"We're [me and my brother X] kinda like you and Chesty on your nightly adventures, except we also speak French together."

"Yea... Ouais, on parle français avec mes... I can't fucking remember, my French is all rusty after not having used it in years."

"Tes frères et soeurs ?"

"Yeah, totally."

Drinking chocolate sauce from chocolate goblets; crunchy chocolates shaped like roses, bunnies, walnuts and barrels. Two of each and the taste of cherries.

Movies, cramped up on a tiny couch full of stuff; emptying it out together.

Period blood everywhere.

"This is just a dream, it has to be, but why can't I wake up and does everything feel so real?" stops the panic from setting in. Why am I washing my hair in this person's bathroom instead of trying to clean up the mess?

And why was I in such a hurry I forgot my shoes in the school bathroom only to have Paula's younger brother throw them in the toilet. Those leather shoes are never going to be shoes again.

standing at a harbor. there were lots and lots of people around and everything looked like one of those disney fairy tale endings, with green hills and everybody's living their happily ever after, except instead of a cartoon picture real green hills and fields and a blue blue sky on a warm summer's afternoon. the harbor i was at was really more like a dirt road by the seaside than a harbor and there was a tunnel of sorts at the top of a little hill if you walked a little further along the road - it looked sort of as if you'd end up inside a ruined castle, if you walked through it, but really you didn't. the road just ended there entirely and you'd fall in the water if you kept walking. it looked sort of like something had taken a huge bite out of the ground right there and whatever used to be there was gone now.

i had to jump over this sort of creek making a "hole" in the ground or road, if you will, while i approached the tunnel. lots and lots of people had gathered around to see what was going on. eva longoria was there with me or at least she was the only person i recognized in the crowd and she was my friend or whatever you want to call it. we were there, sort of talking to each other, or acknowledged each other anyway and exchanged some words about what was going on.

the sun was setting and it was hard to get past all these people, but eva helped me jump over the "hole" in the ground so i wouldn't fall in the water. not that it looked deep or cold or anything. in fact, i'm pretty sure if you'd fallen in, it would have been very warm and nice, but i didn't want to do that. i wanted to get closer to the edge where the ground ended to see "it" before the sun set entirely. couldn't really get too close to the edge with all those people standing there.

you should have seen it. the sky stopped being blue there. it was like someone had taken watercolors and fingerpainted the sky in a billion colors with paint dripping all across the horizon and it was the prettiest thing ever. bright yellow with some black spots like freckles and lines shooting across the sky like fireworks. i wanted so badly to take pictures of it before the sun set and it was all gone, but all i had was a lousy throwaway camera and for the life of me i could not make my hands move fast enough to take as many pictures as i wanted.

***

i was driving out in the cold and snow in our shitty old car, right down the hill past my old school and by the theater. it was getting dark outside. the light always turns red right before you arrive at the intersection so you have to stop - that is, you have to, if there are cars in front of you. otherwise you speed up and drive even though you know you aren't supposed to. but that's just stupid and a waste of time and it's not like anybody cares anyway. but now there were cars in front of me and it was slippery and even though i wasn't going very fast and i hit the breaks as hard as i could, i crashed into the car in front of me with the force of a thousand suns (not really, i just felt like saying that, because of how funny it sounds, "the force of a thousand suns", english is a funny language that way). i swear i still feel like i had actually been in that car crash, even though it never happened.

nobody really got hurt. i wasn't even wearing my seat belt, but i was fine. the sound was terrible though - the car hitting the one in front - metal wrinkling and glass breaking and it felt like i had torn a hole into the fabric that was the world. i didn't know what to do. i always have these dreams, whenever i dream of being behind the wheel. the breaks just don't work or i lose control over the car. before i ever got a license, i used to have dreams that started out with me sitting in the backseat of my dad's car, looking out the window. always in the backseat, looking out the window. sometimes i was alone, sometimes there were others in the car with me. but i was always in the backseat and i would glance around the car to realize no one was driving. the car was driving by itself on a straight road in a desert with nothing around, just a straight road. realizing that no one was driving, instead of panicking i climbed over the seats and took the wheel not even considering anything could go wrong. and it didn't. i took the wheel and knew exactly what to do and everything was fine.

now all i dream about is crashing the car or losing control over it. so much so that after crashing into that car in front of me at the lights and completely wrecking it, probably both of them, i hit at least two other cars while trying to park to call someone to get me out of this mess.

woke up to my mom asking me if i'd like to go to germany with some random dude to get a car.

i said no.

A world of [great] possibility

wanted to write a whole new chapter
about us, but
keep coming back to:
it' easier not to

wanted to punch life in the face
for us, but
keep coming back to:
these metaphores


the moments, when
every option is perfect
each path the right one






Young journalist: Everything you say is contradictory. You can't have been in one place and another at the same time. Of all those lives, which one is the right one?

Nemo Nobody aged 118: Each of these lives is the right one! Every path is the right path. Everything could have been everything else and it will have just as much meaning.

Five to noon, the power plant exploded.

My immediate reaction was to pack your shit and get the fuck out as soon as possible, but just as panic can spread like a deadly disease in a crowd, everybody else in the room seemed to already have accepted their fate. My instictive urge to escape faded as if they had severed a part of me, the only living part left, and drowned it into a bucket:

My mother's inner survivalist was nowhere to be found, and Bill Nighly from Guest House Paradiso had put on the most cheerful face he could find; the others didn't seem to have a clue about what was going on.

After what seemed a lifetime, we climbed into a tiny navy blue car and drove. Instead of driving away, we drove straight to the edge of town where the plant was. It was dark and snowy outside. Everybody else was driving in the opposite direction. I couldn't get myself to say a word and it wasn't due to being paralyzed by fear of dying. I simply couldn't tell if the man behind the wheel was a fucking idiot simultaneously hoping there was a good reason for this. The reason? We pulled over next to a thick concrete wall built on the other side of the river next to the power plant: a safety zone. Inside we found an old school friend of mine and a baby, abandoned.

I didn't know what I was doing. I walked through the tunnel we were in, opened the door at the other end and stared at the disaster area across the river. It seemed like a million miles away, and it was five to noon again, and there was an explosion that brightened up the sky with a mushroom cloud that followed. As I focused to see how bad the damage was, the power plant seemed to get closer until it was at a walking distance. I saw electric pulps of what I assumed to be some sort of radioactive waste come out of the cracks in the wall; like green webs of electricity with a life of their own diving into the river. The water wasn't drinkable. How long would we have to stay here? We didn't have any food.

Quickly closing the door behind me confused about how the explosion happened now while I had been informed it had already happened when we were still at home, I walked back to my family and the man who was there without any reason. None of the questions I posed got a definitive answer, and it seemed like a joke when I pointed out that standing next to a wall made entirely of glass gave us no real shelter.

The abandoned baby was blisfully ignorant about what was going on, but as the explosions outside made the tunnel tremble my mother held it and tried to calm it down as I could see something starting to grow on the baby's chest, beneath its clothes. It was going to die, and my helplessness took the shape of anger as nobody was doing anything.

Suddenly, we were outside, trying to cross the river to get to the power plant. Why; I had no idea, but somehow my mother had ended up in the river and as she tried getting out, one of the seemingly living electric webs caught her and I was sure she would die before getting out, but I still couldn't look away. With her floating lifeless, face in the water, almost ashore, I turned around to find my brother in the water and tried to convince him to get out, but it was like we were in two different TV shows and I was on mute.

Back in our living room. Everybody was alive again. Five to noon. Take two. This time; no. We weren't going to drive in the wrong direction. If I came to survive without dying from cancer or poisoning, I'd become a stand-up comedian. "If this is point A and we're here, and this is point B where the nuclear power plant is, and all we need to do is stay at a 2-3 minute drive from it to stay safe, why are we driving towards it instead of away from it?" (Crowd laughs; I know, worst joke ever.)

In the car again. I don't know where we're driving anymore, but I feel a desperate need to leave this place and the need pours out in a stream of words; the list of reasons to leave grows as the last reason(s) I had to stay is wiped out by a wave of tumors. At this point I'm ready to consider marriage with a man I've never met, until I am informed it would cost me more than I can afford.

I miss...

I wish I could forward the cozy feeling dreams can produce by dressing fragments of them into words that clumsily attempt to describe them. I wish these words could transmit at least a part of that perfect everything I have such a real memory of without physically having experienced it. The playful touch of fingertips on my bare neck and shoulder, the feeling of being pulled next to someone. Little details like a smile, having full awareness; almost being omniscient. It's as if telling a story while being a part of it; how quickly infinite joy disappears and is replaced by utter indifference. I miss [you] in my dreams.

I may swallow words, but this swallows me whole.

There was a big house in the woods on a warm summer's day, a family wearing happy faces and a white car that had three flat tires. There was a party, but I couldn't find my black dress with white spots on it and portraits were painted of young couples; the husband-to-be was to stand a little to the back of their bride-to-be, and I watched from the side as I had no one. Half of the family wasn't properly dressed and it all seemed to be falling apart, but all the while everything was fine.

I don't know how the confusing party in the back yard of the house turned into my senior cruise, and the ship had odd holes and a maze only I could solve. I threw a shoe at someone.

Hiding in plain sight

Maybe I'm unhappy, because I'm tired and my fatigue is ultimately due to my laziness. The best way I know how to fix this is by sleeping, but right now I don't feel tired enough to sleep and have dreams about French airports and misplaced luggage and buying pear marmelade packed in plastic pumpkins that you can find at shopping malls hidden beneath the subway; running and trying to find the words to express myself in French and that obnoxious girl from school standing naked across the room explaining how good pornography is made.

I wish these months passed by faster...

This apartment consisted of bits and pieces plagiarized from several homes I've been let into, not that the outcome was all that pretty or appealing. It didn't feel like home, it felt strange and unfamiliar, and I had responsibilities I didn't remember asking for. Lots of light, lots of space, lots of nice furniture I would never invest in - and the baby I was to look after.

Somehow I was more fascinated by the elephant that could tie its own shoelaces and had six feet; while it wore high heels on three feet and slippers on the other three, I watched it tie them neatly with its trunk and found it amusing. The lady who owned it walked out of the living room that had turned into the outdoors and continued along the road into the jungle, while I was left with a smaller elephant of my own. Quickly I tried to find my elephant shoes as well in order to follow, but they had already disappeared and I felt helpless.

I was back in the living room again with the baby playing around and he looked much like my nephew. He was so tiny he could be dressed in doll clothes and that's what he agreed to wear, so we could go outside. I kept going along with it, even though it felt unpleasant. The door to the balcony was open and there were dozens and dozens of cats that all wanted to play with me; I wanted them to leave me alone. I could feel them on my legs and their claws scratching me. The doorbell rang and I asked Lotta to get it, but she didn't want to help me out. There was a long-haired, bearded man at the door holding a cat by its tail, he threw it in, thanked me for agreeing to look after it and left smiling. I quickly shut the door not to let any of the cats escape.

Lotta told me a bee had managed to get in and we had to get it, so it wouldn't sting the baby. The harder we tried, the harder we failed and then we couldn't find it anymore. There were more and more mosquitoes on the walls though, and I kept killing them. The more I killed, the more the next one started to resemble a small parrot-like bird. They kept getting bigger and bigger with distinctive beaks. Then they started having colors. The bee had disappeared for good, which worried me, and then I couldn't find Lotta either.

There were three colorful parrots on a dresser. I approached them cautiously to smack them to death with the newspaper I had used to whack the smaller bird-looking insects earlier. They didn't move, so I kept hitting them to make sure they were dead. Since I couldn't be sure, I used the rolled up newspaper to puncture one's eyes. For some reason I thought the proper way to deal with my unexplicable rage towards the bird creatures was to bite one's head off. I was worried I'd get some sort of poisoning or fatal disease from the dead thing's head in my mouth though, so I spat it in a sink in the kitchen of the house and kept washing my mouth with water only to find there was more and more bird flesh and feathers stuck in my throat that I had to get out. I thought I was going to throw up.

It was time for my final exams and although it's impossible for one to take three of them on the same day, this is what happened to me and I didn't think it was weird at all; not even when it was biology, math and literature and I'm not even going to take the math exam.

Funnily enough I knew the math and biology, but forgot to answer the questions on literature and after returning my answers I was leaving and remembered turning in an empty sheet of paper. What pissed me off the most was that there were only three questions on literature. I had to answer two of them and the first assignement was actually to write a poem of your own, so there was really no way you could fail at it as you could come up with the answer instead of having to know something.

I panicked so badly about failing high school and/or literature that when I tried to tell one of my literature teachers about what had happened and ask if there was something we could do to fix the situation, I started crying so much I couldn't really produce any sensible speech. Another of my literature teachers showed up and stood there staring without saying anything on the matter. My English teacher gave me two math assignements and told me to do them over every single day to learn them by heart and said it would fix everything.

I was at the library wearing a toga, looking for a book and a couple stopped me. We sat down at one of the tables in the kids books section and they tried to get me interested in working for the congregation. I listened, the man stood up and walked to the window as he kept talking about all the endless possibilities of what I could do. I wanted to laugh and mock him, but instead I sat silently waiting for him to finish.

He sat back down, I looked at him and said there was no fucking way I would ever work for them. He asked why, looking shocked as if everyone he'd ever given this speech to had said yes and there was no other way. I explained how much I despise religion and probably put extra effort into trying to offend him on the side.

I stood up and walked to the library restrooms, took off my toga and started painting my hands and arms with a thick layer of black nailpolish. I then proceeded to cover back up in the big pink cloth I had used as a toga.