To think, To dream, To see

What is classified as a dream when you can no longer wake up? When you’re always awake, at what point does life stop being reality? Where identity leaves a blank space in one’s brain, I feel an insurgence to find out more, to live more and see more. To see more about other people, to see more in other people.

A dream is the reflection of your memories warped, so I know I was not dreaming that night I heard a thud. Because my stillborn twin sisters and the missing limbs of my father still lay next to me now. Yet how can I prove there was a murder when I have no evidence to show?

The more I see in other people, the more it wracks my brain. Every night I go out, hopeful that maybe another chance encounter will tell me more.

My little black book speaks to me, even when the whole world does not. It tells me what they’re thinking, what they’re about to say before they say it. Their long faces look at me. Their eyes filled with an urge to leave, but leave to where? There is nowhere to go in this small world where we run in circles for years of our lives.

Their calculated promises do not escape me. My little black book tells me of them all.

Y O U ‘ R E D E L U S I O N A L

My longing to know about others envelopes me. I investigate the cries behind the eyes, the souls that cannot escape their draconian confinements. The types of people that make your stomach turn at the thought of them yet fill you with comfort when they are around. People think I’m crazy investigating something that seemingly never happened, but even if every indication of foul play is scorched, all memory can never be erased.

P O O R G I R L

I am not looking for pity. I do not want their sympathy.

My skin is itching.

M A Y B E I F I G E T H E R T O L O O K J U S T T H I S W A Y

There is no need for me to look any which way. I know what you are hiding. $20,000 in stolen assets. And I know how you died. A high price to pay for the comforts of a small heist.

But maybe the even higher price to pay was my own now that I am here half dead with you.

To dream is to scream of happiness. It is riveting, roaring, relentless. Reconciling with destiny before it all disappears in a fleeting moment. And yet in one moment, you find that all is lost again. The beeping of your alarm, the ring of the doorbell, or your own subconscious telling you that your time is up. And in the fleeting moment in which you are lost in eutopia, the stain of your dream is permanently imprinted and then left dormant in your brain. Only to be awoken by the intensity of the stars as soon as the event surrounds you again in your waking state.

They will call you crazy. Label it to the phenomenon of déjà vu. But it is that spark in your heart and the light that shines behind your eyes when you know that what you are experiencing is more than just a muddle of memories. It was predetermined fate, narrated by the dreams that you do not remember intertwining with the facts of your reality. Bypassing your brain and speaking directly to your soul.

And that gut-wrenching feeling that you have when something is about to go terribly wrong? Your intuition? It is the dance of agonies coursing through your veins as your body tells you to RUN.

It is your own little black book, that you have not mastered reading yet. To cultivate understanding and acknowledgment. Because you simply stop yourself at the point where it is labeled ‘just a feeling’.

Would you listen to this feeling more if it appeared as letters in a book telling you to MOVE?

Well I didn’t listen to mine. And now I am here.

Your money meant nothing to me but a means to answers.

To dream is to prove that you are not simply just living, but you are alive. I wanted to prove that I was alive to people who had already traded their souls to the rat race.

That I was not like my dead father and sisters.

That I was innocent.

And even more innocent knowing the intentions of the people around me. Sitting on an iceberg of lies concealed beneath a tip coated in empathy.

They swing on the set from which they had already been hung, swaying with the winds of society’s sweet calling. I have seen so many people give their life away before it had even begun, people who have almost ended up in positions like mine.

To hold onto life, you must hold onto this fanatical ability. The ability to denounce the constrictions of society and be brave enough to scream your own. It is the silent defiance that lets out of the maze of life by showing you that there is no roof.

And to write these out is to plan revolution. To give language to the parts of you that have been so forcibly emancipated from the world. And it is those who can write it out that go on to be leaders in this fatuous society.

We have charred our brains to the point it makes aspirations beyond a house and a family seem like fairy tales.

You die because of your greed. Your desire for money consumes you.

It takes you to the brinks of humanity, a confession of your nescience to all bystanders with their hope intact.

But the cemetery will humble you. And living in the cemetery will kill you.

Surrounded by death it will toy with your heart not letting you escape, teasing you and tormenting you until it has been appeased. Do not play with the game of life unless you are able to set your own little black book free. As I did. As they did. As my father did.

And as you did.

Was the money really worth it?

I can see it in you, holding your corpse in my hands. It wasn’t for me either.

So tell me now who is going to save me from this hell?

I keep hearing thuds from above. More people have joined us. But I wonder when they will find me. And maybe they’ll give me a new little black book.

I have my own little black books now.

I slice carefully through their charred skin, there aren’t many people left around me. To bind my dreams into this is the closest form of love and dignity that I can gift to them. Maybe one day my bindings will instead be red, whilst my cadaver lays at rest.

For while I continue to dream there will always be light at the end of my tunnel.

I will always know what you are thinking because I have gone through this, over and over again. My little black book will never not know what is about to happen, because everything that could happen has already happened.

I can’t wake up from my dream.

But at least mum is safe.