Thoughts on the end...

The real tragedy of life is that we just keep living; even when we don't want to, even when it hurts so much that you just don't fucking want to. No one dies of sadness. No one dies of loneliness.

No one of a broken heart.

It would be fitting, poetic even, but reality is neither. We wander down empty hallways, stumbling again and again upon the relics of a past that we are powerless to change. The pain of loss is something that each of us owns forever. And it's torture. Constant, unrelenting torture.

And you know that it is yours.

Forever and ever, Amen.

"Animals" ~Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days.

My Ghosts are Gaining on Me...

So this is the dream:

...drips of rainwater are falling from the ceiling tiles overhead as I walk down the hallway at my old high school. I can hear the rain outside pattering against glass even though there are no windows in the hall. The girl with the long, dark hair is ahead of me, seemingly a mile away in the impossibly long corridor. She neither hurries nor slows, and I hang back, watching, sure that I know who it will be when she turns around. She passes two girls talking on the left, and approaches a wooden door a little further on.

I follow, now running.

I pause for a moment next to the girls and say, "That's Alisha! She's been dead for 3 years." (Almost ten now, but in dreams, who can tell?)

Ashli, the one closest to me, says, "She's not dead, I made her a mask. Out of skin."

Up ahead, Alisha opens the door, and briefly I catch a glimpse of her face: scarred, sewn up, no mouth on the lower half. The one eye I can see is huge, like that of an insect. The door closes behind her and the sound echoes forever in the hallway.

I head for the door with Ashli and the other girl behind me. Inside the room it's pitch black. I get the impression of entering a huge space, like a cave or a concert hall. Suddenly a light clicks on just ahead of us, and I see a silhouette of a woman standing before us. She is backlit, her features hidden in shadow. There is something moving just behind her shoulders, rolling like waves striking the shore.

I want to move forward but I'm frozen in place.

Three things happen all at once then: the rolling shadows behind her unfurl into huge black wings, stretching out as if they'd been asleep for a long, long time; another light comes on, illuminating her face, revealing white skin that looks to have been sewn together out of various different parts--a puzzle that didn't quite fit together right and had to be forced--those huge eyes are a piercing blue, and regard me with something like distaste; finally her arms, deathly pale like her face but unmarked with angry red suture lines, reach out for me. An embrace then, that is her price, one that with surely bring death. And this is how it ends, those open arms waiting to collect me...