To Worms We Return

Good morning, the moon flicks my chest through the passing trees to wake me up. It's not quite morning yet. She flicks harder and it does nothing because she's made of dumb, antiquated light. I remain unconscious, good night.

It's widely accepted under the moon that the meaning of life has something to do with belonging or love, or loving the present. Always something of the sort... however-- I think that sometimes the meaning can be that I want to become so little and try to make everyone forget my meaning.

Then I would be unregulated by a second or third or millionth someone else's mind and go run off into the wilderness or whatever, not to be remembered, nor noticed nor missed, nor forgotten. Simply flying under the radar. Meaning is defined by the current perspective of only the beholder. Currently mine maybe, is not to be beheld.

It's 3:14 AM; I'm not typically asleep this early, but I could only sneak so much awake-medicine past the ticket collector.

And it's too late for consumption at this point, even if I were awake. I'd feel like a Ferrari and my guttural metallic chaos would wake up everyone on the train. This would be bad of course.

(I wouldn't know that the time is 3:14 AM, because my quiet body is asleep so quite sound for a face so quite vibrating on the train's windowpane.)

There's a dream that I have every once in a while where I'm the fantastic Venus, but then she, the planetary tabloids agent, comes around and rallies the planets into kicking me out of orbit. For the rest of the dream I'm always soaking in jealousy of an irrelevant planet's ordinality. The boring orange dot in the blackness, Mars, wowing me once again. No problems except for being unspecial. Most people wouldn't take more than a couple seconds to look at the thing even if they knew what it was up there.

I shouldn't be here in this dream right now. I'm supposed to stay awake through the night see the sun come up, I'm attempting to reclaim each morning as my own under the therapist Dr. Morgan's suggestion. I haven't a good outlook on that time of day. Mine was stolen.

I've spent too much of myself trying to make sense of where I am. Time is supposed to be such an historically unchanging force of nature, inherently belonging only to each mind that perceives it, so the thought that one human could steal half the very fabric of day away from another troubles me deeply. It's the thought maybe, and the thinking then the lack of it to be absent that actually stole the mornings from me, not the person.

Never mind the mechanics of it, Dr. Morgan claims she will help me steal the morning back nonetheless. Our sessions are typically filled only with me falling asleep, while she talks and wildly misinterprets anything valuable that my waking self might say in the gaps. She's bad at listening, probably bad at theft too, but she's world class at assembling an itinerary so together we will steal half of day.

...it shouldn't cause any excessive damage for you to probably stay up a few extra hours if that's your choice... you're doing it on purpose. Do something to help you enjoy staying awake-- perhaps try traveling!

And so I did some traveling, off to the morning, off to Worms if that's called vacation, where the window trees whiz past my bubble at an ever-shifting density. Then the morning might not feel quite like some exact zone that I know the hair-pulling terror of. All theoretically becomes warm and ungraspable with Dr. Morgan's plan, but now the morning is only light changing on my sleeping eyelids making me into a crazy imaginary rave Venus. I missed my chance.

Oh well. More where that came from.

Next time I reckon, once I strip the morning of its taint I'll need to put something nice in its place. I'll eat some classically conditional chocolates as I look directly into the red morning sun. Sailors take warning. I'll sneak up on it from the front so it feels like night; it doesn't work to catch it only by the tail end like a normal person.

I tried that on the normal schedule for one cycle of all seasons and the sun never aged into next. He's only removed his tail like a threatened lizard and turned around to bite me every day, keeping me without pleasant earliness.

That sun moves at such an untraceable speed. It's so far away I cannot stop it. I cannot translate its location into significance. So I'll do what's possible on my end, the sneaking up on the morning from the front, waiting prepared to catch it, and hopefully prepared not to lose track of my place under the sun even further if I tire later.

William Gershwin the conductor announces that the train is changing its course because of a freight blockage on the current (the ones typically designated for public transportation) tracks. But his message doesn't connect to my mind of course, so I only hear bbbbbbb from the window which translates roughly into something else for my dreams: No Tony, don't let me go to the hockey thing, no Tony don't you dare allow this to happen!

Tony (or Nadia, for use outside of this dream. There, I said it) is like Earth, third and watery. She thinks; what good is my human experience if nobody else knows it? and kicks me out of orbit.

She's not angry. She just wants to be understood. And I refuse to speak badly of her, it's none of my business. I must've been asleep when she'd had this realization the first time.

Last I went to Worms was when my parents dragged me there for a historical getaway at the rich age of 11, which was what mornings felt like before I regrettably forfeited them over to someone who had sworn her allegiance to me forever so I thought it would be fine.

From grapes to Worms now I travel, to kill the morning at the source. I can't believe I gave her such an untouchable memory. I hate myself. I could do this in my sleep.

I'm always explaining why. I feel like that's something that you just have to get used to if you're always as asleep as I am, explaining why things always go so wrong. I don't know how to do anything else.

I can't even drive the car anymore, which is why I'm on this fancy train. I can't drive because I can't stay awake because I don't want to be awake-- but sometimes I do, until I remember the risk of seeing her by accident and so I close my eyes again. I must call her her because if I say her name it will reoccur in my dreams. For the sake of my dream self, I'm always explaining because.

The train catches some grooves and glides over the track switching thing, with only 2 alleged miles to spare before colliding into the freight jam. The new tracks under us are thinner and older, dented and rattling the train around even more now: My dream city's streets turn into uprooted pipes and knock me over, but I'm trying to get across them to see Dr. Morgan before I travel to Saraav. I still live in Macedoen, after all this time. It's gonna take an army of me to fix all these pipes in time for the appointment.

My face shimmies down the train window into a comfortable place for my head to bounce on the sill. I'm alone in my bogie, where no one is around to save my forehead from bruising. In my dream a power line is downed right into the puddle of water from the city pipes that I'm standing in.

The electricity inspires the realization that something, everything, is wrong in the puddle. I'm not headed to Dr. Morgans, I'm off to Worms! How did I not know that? Cummon.

The train conductor has something to say:

-Sorry about the turbulence.

The captain always goes down with the ship.

In my hypnopompia I hear him say that he's sorry about the turbulence and I think it's God apologizing for putting me in some sort of man made disaster in the street. I say it's okay, something about forgiving Venus if Venus' harmful rays were primitive as a boy.

The world shifts to what feels like normal and things make complete sense now. I'm on a train and there are some people in the bogie along with me. A man in a bowler cap, smoking a pipe seems disappointed in me for being such a slob with my face on the glass.

Frantic, I wipe off the glass with the sleeves of my satin bomber and begin to explain my narcolepsy, but what I assume to be his wife in the puffy red dress slaps hubby on the shoulder with her fan and hushes me. I don't owe her husband anything, so she claims.

There is a lovely lady next to me. Her hands have been on my cheek this whole time, I've just realized. I can't tell what her face looks like. She might be a spider.

Scenery outside begins to pass quicker. It's high noon. Out of the corner of my eye I wonder if the flight attendant will pass by with candy.

Through the slats I see her blur down the speedy aisle. She didn't have anything for us I reckon.

-Excuse me lady, can you please take your hand off my face?

It comes out as a sad story, she cries out of pity and runs out from the bogie. I begin to explain myself to the other two, to cover my tail. The lady in red slaps my face with her fan and her husband grabs her arm in agreement, escorts her out to the aisle. They leave me. No embrace.

The door slides shut automatically from its springs, leaving me in this ocean of myself, and mention it as such due to the faintest scent of ambergris. It was probably in the rich lady's purse. Maybe if I find it I can sell it and buy a flight off of this train.

I get up to follow them and chase them down, but the moment I put my hand on the door a horrible feeling happens in my gut. Do I really want to know who's out there? Certainly not. It could be her. I turn to the ladder in my compartment and try to climb to the roof instead.

I can only make it half way up because of the vibrating train and the vertigo that I clinically have because of sleepiness. I feel like I'd be bad at being a lizard, and continue never to try. The conductor has something to say:

-Attention passengers! We will arrive at Worms in three more days. Thank you, that is all.

What? Am I a dead man trapped in a dream of running? Because last time I checked, this was a fourteen hour train ride!

Oh well. More where that came from.

I think life is about chances. There are always more chances. Life’s not about taking them or missing them, I don’t think. There's no point in that, but about chances at redemption. A painter, not merely creating a painting but fixing the mistakes on a blank canvas until it is decided that there is enough paint there.

Venus goes around the sun in 225 Earth days. She generates a past of incidents faster than anyone on Earth and probably has a horrible memory for it. She probably ruins things majorly on a daily (Venus-daily) basis. She doesn't have to run for so long, because the solutions come swift too. All this happens as she runs in the same circle, where she's surrounding things she's seen & been before.

If we're all trapped in our own unchanging circles, what's the point if not to change them? There's nowhere to run, after all. Or something elliptical like that, I don't know. I'm dizzy and spinning in circles of my own from trying to climb the ladder.

-Sorry about that folks, I meant to say three and a half days. Please enjoy a complementary chocolate truffle from Sofia or Bernard. We'll be at Worms in only just four days. Thank you.

More where that came from. Oh, well.

I crack open the sliding door and stick my hand out of it to flag down Bernard or Sofia and hopefully not Na-. Her.

Something squishy and dripping is plopped into my hand. I retract it and here we have some ambergris. The stench returns, far greater than before. There is nowhere here to store, throw, finance with interest, or dine with this raw blob.

It occurs to me that there is probably no market for ambergris on this train, certainly not one worth inhaling this wretched- oh God- horrible, horrible smell while I wait for a buyer.

Acting now, I drop it back out of the door on the floor as quick and discrete as I can. No use to try and flush it down in my personal toilet or to try and figure out the window machine, out must happen now.

Someone opens and closes my stall door as a secret from me and I watch the ambergris roll across my floor again. I smell its return. I try to kick it back out, but someone in the aisle is blocking it with their foot when I open my door, and then there's this horrible game of ambergris footsies to keep it with the other. The foot doesn't want the ambergris out there and I don't want it in here.

-WHO IN THE HELL?

I slam the door open and storm out, the ambergris rolls off to who knows where.

I'm furious in the aisle now. I meet eyes with the other foot owner, the conductor it so happens to be.

-...Who's driving?

-Please, go back to sleep sir.

He motions me back into the bogie. People are staring through their little mail slats, some already in the hall. I will not look back at them, I will only retreat. I go to lay down, but no...

Something previously unaccounted for: the conductor had looked oddly familiar in the aisle. His mannerisms had seemed more doctorly than I remembered them to be when handing him my ticket to get in here a few days ago.

A nonnegotiable curiosity takes sudden control of me. I peer out into the aisle around the sliding door and see that the crowd has subsided. The conductor is still standing there, like he's my body guard.

-Dr. Morgan?

He does not respond.

-Have you seen... Nadia? Is she on this train to Worms?

-Sie stieg in Zürich aus.

-Okay. Yesterday?

He nods his head, I retract once again into my cell.

I hadn't realized that the train had made any stops at all.

Dr. Conductor Morgan says something quieter at me through my door. It is muffled:

-Sie fliegt zu Würmern, während wir sprechen. Ach, Guten Morgen. Die Sonne.

There is no escape, the morning bites me now again. The repulsive crisp and cool morning feeling is enforced by the fact that she'll be in Worms when I arrive. If I ever arrive. I question no further. No need for why.

She's not on the train.

Relief.

My mint box containing the small amount of cocaine that I hadn't realized I'd lost track of slides under the door. I assume the doctor is returning it to me.

I think about it for a second and go blank, staring into the mint company's deceptive logo. Then I leave it there. Out of the blue, my stirring feels newly obsolete.

I walk out with a sudden confidence! ...Without vertigo, which I'm sure I never had in the first place! The conductor is not to be seen. He must be back up front at the locomotive, driving the train.

Off to the dinner car to try and make friends. Maybe I'll go to the checkers car next, I'll look out some of the other windows at the passing scenes.

I could get used to this.

But as I'm walking, my legs seem to become immobilized. I'm sweating in the blaze of no sun anywhere. Something maybe, is quite off. I'm about to wake up. Of course.

I smell smoke. And dirt. And Nadia.

I see a vast blue. And Nadia. She's crying.

Blue is the sky, and her crying is my health because my legs seem to be-- gone. I'm on the floor, where someone that just lost their knees would be. Nadia looks down on me, covered in the same chimney smut that I assume to also be on my face from whatever accident just happened.

Her tears turn into embrace when she sees that my eyes are open, but the doctors tell her to put me down unless she wants to drain all the blood out from the holes that are my thighs.

I try to talk to her, to fix my past as a painter on Venus would, but I don't remember what I'm supposed to say.

-Um... Dr. Morgan...

There's not enough blood. I'm delirious.

I don't finish wherever I was going with my statement, and Nadia scrunches her face into somewhere between annoyed and confused.

I refuse to close my eyes. I watch Nadia snort the rest of my coke.

Nadia will not glance at the train rubble. It's a problem that she will not address, but I will. I want to see it.

There it is.

The possibility is none of my business, but it feels like nothing to me to know she still cares. Maybe it always felt this way, like savage nothingness in the face of compassion. I don't remember. I wonder how I'd feel if she weren't here, looking at me, and I at her from probably my really unreasonably perplexed and stupid expression. I would probably feel... sleepy? Longing. It's a classic grass is always greener situation.

It's funny how in a dream, in a running dream where I'm running from the horrifying whatever, if I glance back at my assailant I'll have no idea what I'm looking at. It'll be a vague simple thing that I can't justify being afraid of, and if I confront him I'll wake up. What's the point in running, dreaming, waiting, if not to pass the time?

-Attention passengers: one hour until we arrive at the destination.

The ruffling of suitcases. The orangest ever sun peaking over the Black Forest into my wet eyes.