There’s this dream I keep having. And I’m told to talk about, although, I’d prefer not to. I’ve always had a clear mind, and (even if my emotions aren’t always in line with my own objectivity and rationality) I’ve always been able to see myself, as well as my place in this world, distinctly, containing whatever good or bad comes with my meager existence.

Shortly, I’ve always known myself to be disconnected. Still, I never realized my true separation from the world until I came here. I talk and I speak clearly and, yet, it appears that I am speaking a different language. While they listen, to them my language is an irrelevant one, only significant in context, for the practical purpose of my presumed healing. Not that this means I’m insane. I’m too level headed to be insane, at least for long. I’m too emotional and depressive to not occasionally lose my mind. However, since coming here, I’ve only been more assured in my sanity (not that that’s a good thing). It’s just, I don’t like to be reminded of my severe separation. I’ve never liked to be reminded of that fact; that’s why I’ve always separated myself from people. So, I can’t say what I want to say without tossing words away at the wall, and being left more frustrated and alone. That is why I’m writing this, in a lame manner as if I am talking to someone, though really, I’m just talking to myself. Maybe a different part of myself, though, or about.

I can only describe this dream as an image. As I try to picture it, it seems different than it does in my sleep. So white and blank. I think that because that’s how it is here, within these walls. White and blank and sterile. My mind is feeling the creeping tinges of my surroundings. That’s why I snuck out to the yard, wearing only this thin uniform and a beige blanket from my bunk. Under this tall, needled bush that crawls up the polished brick wall, I found a small spot of snowless dirt, where I can look up and see the stretching green of the tree and, above that, the black of the sky, punctured by a few stars not shunned by the city lights.

But, the dream. The dream is different. I am very aware of my body; my eyes staring in their sockets, my wispy soul, stuck and searching. An old oak, scarred and swaying, is against my back, on a small hill. It’s summer and I can feel watery grasses and cattails grazing skin, the wind pushing them in patterns. A babbling stream slips from a stagnant pond, crowded with growth. There is a smell in the air that is thick and strange and complex. It’s a green smell, like algae on a smoothed rock. Like moss growing out of the substance it steals. Fertilization, death and budding, growth, idleness and decay. The smell of death is especially thick. I know if I get up and wander, I’ll find a dead goose swarming with maggots and sprouting mushrooms in the thatches. An odd and natural feeling arises. I could describe its texture and character if the right words existed. It’s like when you are a kid and the world is wholly felt; foreign, but also half-remembered, and with no suggestion of meaning, other than what is whispered in your ear by the wind, what sinks and sticks in your gut. A mysterious feeling, certainly, but not an unusual or grotesque one. To the sky, I raise my head; it is blue and empty, though alight with the incoherent screeching’s and songs of birds. The sounds are swallowed by a jet. I grow uneasy. Above me, a long branch cracks like a neck and falls. It splits in two as it hits the ground, with one part lost to the grasses, another tumbling down into pond, to be swept up by the creek. Carried off and forgotten.

All I know anymore is a splurge of feelings, slipping amorphously and strangely across the earth; I am not separate from it. Internal, load bearing walls that have held up my delusions about the world have fallen, and life is revealed as a mess of disjointed feeling. A rush of water across a scattered landscape.
This is not bad, nor is it good. It’s not frivolous, simple, or small, nor does it have meaning. I’ve felt this way before, but now I know I could sit here, beneath this pine, forever. I could die and decay; my bones slip into dust in the dirt, my skin into sustenance for the tree, and I’d be feeling and thinking much the same.

Years led to this, but it started intensely on a day like any other. Arriving home from school, after an unusually social day of stumbling distantly through halls, I dropped off my neighbor with a joke, honked to another as she got off the bus. I ate food with family: burned chicken and peas; jokes about the cooking were made. I argued and easily made up with my older brother, still hazy from drinking and work. He said it was hard being almost-sober. I said it was hard being almost-alive. My sister called from school and talked about a book. I felt the usual pull to be outside, especially intensely on this day. I announced that I would squeeze in an hour of muzzleloader hunting. My mother told me I shouldn’t go, then put a pair of gloves my pocket.

Walking from the warmth of the house, feeling odd and empty, I stepped into the chill, where the howling wind ran through skeletal trees, silhouetted against the shortening light of the sun. It called out to me like a wild, indescribable siren, with her hair ragged, face and body obscured, as she stands on a rock before a billowing sea, staring out and blowing a horn that clears the clouds in an eye above her, and causes the rest to orbit the creature in all its fullest and strangest glory. I saw her in the twisting trees.

In my truck, I pulled out of the driveway and a pitch-black cat crossed the road ahead. We both stopped and stared at each other through the windshield, me with my murky eyes, the cat with its own, already slightly aglow, despite the lightness still in the sky. The cat sulked into the woods, and I drove on to do the same.

My grandmother lives, isolated, along the same road I was driving, so I decided to quickly stop and say hello. The house, wooden and painted a fading red, is half built into a hill, with a crumbling stone staircase that leads to the front door. I know every secret of the house and the surrounding grounds; with its brooding, mystic streams and trees that stand bent on the hill, staring out onto the endless mountains and dilapidated highway below. The knowledge is a remnant of childhood summer days spent there with a gang of often foolhardy cousins, forming legends about lurking creatures and odd happenings of the dark corners of the house, forest and abandoned shacks beside the abandoned railroad.

I walked into the house; my grandmother sat in a stool on the kitchen, looking wornly out the window. She is a clear-eyed and quick-witted women, with a passion for cigarettes and cocky, sincere smiles, not dissimilar from my own. Since my grandfather passed in the year that I was born, she has grown lonely and, recently, has, on certain days, been slipping into the murky regions of the mind. On this day, she held my hand and mistook me for my father or grandfather. She called me by their name, which is also mine. When I told her I was not him, she wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, she asked me if I visited my sister recently.

“My sister?” I asked, confused. Among my father’s large family is several sisters, all of whom live so close to each other, that visitation is not something that has to be thought out or considered, but is a mere consequence of leaving the house.
“Yes, I went the other day and put flowers out for her. It must be years since you last went to see her.”
“My sister,” I repeated, shocked and deeply saddened, a sickening feeling growing in my gut. Why have I never heard about this? Families as large as mine have so many people and secrets that whispers of everything usually reach you. But I had never heard this, about my own father. As I thought, she fumbled through a drawer and produced a black and white photo. It was a photo of my grandparent’s children when they were still young and incomplete, all dressed in their finest. Beside an old oak tree, a toddler sat contentedly in the dirt; a carriage contained infant twins. Two young children stood with their backs against the oak, smiling and squinting, slightly shy under the lens. One was a boy, clearly my father. The other was a girl I’d never seen before; she stood pale as a ghost, leaning against my father’s shoulder.
Jesus, I thought, stunned. I soon said my goodbyes and left, dazed.

On a dirt road, I drove deeper into the woods, my mind swimming and subdued. I don’t think my thoughts can be transcribed without stripping them of their significance. I will say though, I thought about my father’s eyes. He is an intelligent and personable man, easy to joke or tell one of his many stories. But, I don’t think I have ever seen him, in any mood, without those sad, blue eyes like sky. I wondered if his sister once had the same eyes. I wondered if some sadness stains you forever.

Realizing that the feelings and thoughts I was having were overpowering, I searched for an explanation of their effect, and found a disheartening one. With age, in such a simple Age, I had become far removed from this kind of complex, unexplainable emotion and sadness. It seems common practice to kill the significance of these frightful thoughts where they stand, and let them blow away like sand. Yet, I longed only to bury my heart in them; because they were real and they were true. Though I always saw myself as searching for it, I had long forgotten the taste of truth. In my mind, I made an oath to not forget the burgeoning of my heart on that day

I parked and leaned against a tree, loading my gun passively, out of compulsion. Regardless of what I saw, I knew I wouldn’t take a shoot, partly due to a fast encroaching darkness, but mostly because of the conversation with my grandmother, which, inexplicably, left me with the thought that I wished to live the rest of my life without being seen or heard, without leaving a footprint in the mud, or a mark to name me by. If I could not slip into a crack that lead down to oblivion, today, I only wished to wander and occasionally sit, with the coldness of the metal barrel in one hand and the soft, dampness of dead leaves held lightly in the other. I wondered if this feeling betrayed my earlier oath.

The night opened up as the light died, slipping into a blue twilight. Above me, the trees, leafless, black, and filled with long hidden life, swung hypnotically. They harbored truth in their bareness, in their strangeness, in the fear and passion that they inspired. Hollow and blaring sounds issued forth from the branches, as the wind whipped parallel the crest of the mountain. It was a song of the world, and it was a hollow one. A droning song that slipped me into a trance, blue and sobering as the night.

I came to rest beside a stream gutted deep into the earth. On the bank, an oak grew, its roots scooping out a little hollow just above the rushing water that slipped over tumbles of rock and little walls of ice. I sat and put my back against the bark, letting my legs lay limp on the ground canopy of musky, dead leaf and thin plots of snow.

For a moment, I was truly content in the world. I saw my long legs clothed in camo pants, relaxed and motionless, stretching out easily, as if I was asleep under the trees, brightening stars, and darkening sky. Long, colored socks from my elementary school soccer team could be seen sticking out of muddy hunting boots, looking out of place and adding to the air of openness I felt I was exuding in my seclusion. Bare, pale hands held my muzzleloader loosely at my knees. I was as a human ought to be: at peace with our basic and beautiful desires. In nature and slightly separate from it, filled with a heavy heart as I stared at the indifferent and powerful wind and world rush by emptily, blankly staring back through me. In return, I knowingly brought the wind and world into my heart, and loved it wholly; let it become part of myself, giving it identity, humanity, and divineness. The heart is the only thing meant to decide such things. It has been doing so for as long as men drew pictures of beasts and trees, with themselves among them, on stone walls. Fervently scraping blistered and dyed fingers with constrained, though fanatical, pulsings of passion; the strange hard beatings of the heart which sound deep within all chests and cannot be described.

But then, I turned. In the west a bit of sickly pink still sat in the sky. I could see the steam from the nuclear power plant rising over the mountain, like a great second sun. It was the shape of an enormous whale, shooting upwards from the most unhabituated and empty regions of the sea, and ever rising, ever growing. It was uniform and blank, faceless and deformed, and yet it grew across the pure blue twilight, bringing everything to a shade of black deeper than any found in nature.
I believed it to be rising towards me, its mouth gaping and bottomless, threatening to shallow me.
It was swallowing others, I felt, bringing them to a place not found on the earth, but only in the most silent and heartless regions of the brain.

The trees kept blowing, but all sound hushed at the coming of the shadow. The coming of the smog, the heartless sea, the great whale, the second sun; built by man and splayed across the once blank and reflective canvass of sky. My spine felt numb, and the air turned neutral, without heat or warmth or memory. Without acknowledgement. How could a human heart stand against smog that blows with menace and grows out the hands of man, which have been morphed from flesh into metal masses against the skyline?

I stood and laid my gun on a rock. I walked toward the vision, where my mountain dropped and I could see the whale rising above another. The world was laid out before me, and I was filled with no thoughts of the past or present, but only a future that brought horror to my heart and hollowness to my bones. In the valley, where woods once were, I saw a great plastic city. Endless and growing, its empty streets clean and clear and always turning into clones. A city filled with the unknowingly dispossessed. Lacking any warmth of hearth or blood. Yet no moans escaped with the shallow breath of the saddened questioners of the world, who are all people. Only silence, which spoke of the indifference harbored in the hearts of men who blighted the landscape with triumph-less monuments made at the sacrifice of their humanity and identity in the name of practicality and production, conformity and calmness, ease of life and lack of thought. It was a rootless city, founded to ignore the significance of the roaring emptiness of the wind during dead of the night, and in doing so, forgetting the fullness of the blood-red dawn. It was only a soulless suburb. And in it was nothing to save me from the ferociously empty, carelessly blowing of the wind. It offered me only walls and avoidance, and I could accept neither, so I was blown away forever by the wills of the wind.

And I blew into the city, where I sensed that it was winter. But, I knew if any one were to walk from their homes, I would not see the shifting smoke of breath in the air. No warmth escaping from the furnace alight inside men’s chest. The flames have been extinguished, for flames are too strange and unknowable. Man’s fire’s been smothered for safety, for simplification and definition. Squeezed of all meaning and emotion, and filed into a category in the Universe’s numerical and faceless encyclopedia.

And the faces of the inhabitant would all be bloodless, for they are without care for life or death and need no meaning, so distracted as they are by the shining of sleek metals and plastics. I drifted the city among them, and so I was one of them also, and I saw in a delirious moment of realization that we would all be alone forever, separated by feet and ever shrinking inches, but lost in our own sandblasted expanses of colorless mind. I saw that this city had reached the end of its history; it would stay as it was forever. Only the graveyard would grow, fill with bones forgotten by those whose tendons have turned tieless.


Death looks so much worse when it doesn’t matter. With all things already sunk; rocks in a river, rearranging themselves.

I realized I was on my knees, vomiting and tearing in the cold dirt. I looked up at the now blackened sky, clouded and lightless; only the moon shone, and she was as white and hollow as bone, staring down with a half-winked stare. In an instant, the moon evaporated into what it really was, more distant dust in the desert. I wished to crush my heart with a stone.

So, I wandered and stole myself away, a mad and clothes-less phantom of a man, and tried to feel words in the wind again. But, the world had turned to marble and I to mist.

The highway was blaring chaotically in the mid-day rush when I came upon it. I heard no words in its roar either, but I stood by the guardrail and found the metal and asphalt’s predictable pattern. It crushed me to hear it. What a boring way to be crushed, I thought, what a dry way for a soul to die.

I had been previously blind the resounding power of society’s dehumanization. Now I wonder, has it always been there? Was this blank crop cultivated by man in the first plowed field, or is it a new lab-breed mutation? Maybe, those who’ve always lived for the warm beating of hearts only did so with ignorance of this terrible vision of the world; maybe they learned to ignore it, seek truth in some crevice in the earth.

Whatever, though. I don’t know a fucking thing anymore. I know a terrible despair, in this amorphous, unclear soul of mine. I believe that I’ve glimpsed a worse world to come.

And here I am. All but tied to my bed. I wish I could say I’d rather be somewhere else. That is a statement of hope, “I’d rather” is. Truth is, now that I’ve spilled this all out is, I realize I really don’t give a damn. Anywhere else I’d be tied, also. Anywhere else I’d be swallowed by white walls. How long could delusions, how long could a search for trueness save me in such a bored, clean and saline, falsely-scientific society?

Contemplation only leads to more complex confusion, it seems; don’t deny it. Should I edit this personnel, nut-house journal so I sound like less of a psycho-cynic; so I sound more understanding? No, editing is evil. I read that somewhere. So are bitter, remorseful sarcastics who speak only in earnest. Why not? Forget the loss of life in the living, mostly I just hate overwrought, overwritten absurdity that isn’t meant to be absurd.

I write the page’s last word and I’m still the same. That's all fine, it's time to sleep and wake up to the same place.