Read something in a dream last night that was better than this so I revised it—this, not the dream but in the dream I could plainly see the words and world and almost taste them both, so when I woke up I exhaled and did.

Did it, I did, pushed the air back out of mostly empty lungs like backward going for comfort first, starved of art and full up on food and shelter after years of choking down silence for dinner and only really making sound in sleep, remembering how someone I know and daresay might as well trust said it might be hard out there to find good old fashioned neuroses and interesting conversation and so I closed my eyes and stayed inside and pictured people all around and everywhere frozen with the scream face. At the table, at the corner store, down on the avenue, crossing the street, driving, in bed, everywhere muted terror and I felt ok.

Then I remembered and the story happened. Two times in New York one night, time one in some small seedy hotel room from horror films and horror thoughts and the not so distant past—old of structure and worn and soiled from top to bottom and inside out, more like too much had happened, though, than too little cleaned. The big wet spot on the bed—just left of center—had been made by an almost steady drip from a crack in the ceiling up above which felt like the firmament pressing down, the world pressing down, ready to break through. I was there with at least one other, some other standing silent seeming far off away from me in the shadowed corner, not benevolent, not malicious, but instead a being of perfect indeterminacy split 50/50 good and bad and making my neck hairs stand. Yellowing light like old book page paper corners and just as thumbed-through fuzzy crept through lowered and downtwisted jaundice blinds as if their decay and nicotened filth was in fact the source of the room’s meager illumination, aside from a whitish slice of hallway light wedged beneath the door. The bed stood an inexplicable most-of-the-way across the room like it was edging toward the window and I didn’t blame it, its featureless brown wood-like headboard a good foot off the wall, an accidental screaming statement of incidental significance and I wondered why and, as usual, how I’d ever get out without motion and how I’d move without sound.

Later in a car, parked, motor off, windows up, and cold. Vastness of a nighttime parking lot, the verysame nighttime night, but time two this was. Same part of town, though, still unfamiliar, tall scrapers looming all around and a snaking river nearby reflecting scattered lights, the water at least eight shades darker than the black-orange sky. Trying to get hold of him, that’s what I was doing, because I needed help, and there I sat in that car in the middle of that no man’s land scrolling thumbwise and hopelessly through some absent someone else’s misleading tangle of contacts, a glowing rectangle of scrambled names and numbers in my hand and I hadn’t the faintest sense of where to look or how. Or maybe that was just my head. Not in it, just it, because for the death of me I couldn’t tell who was who or even if any of those seeming non-whos were, if they were anything more than entries on an endless catalogue of indistinction, known and unknown no ones even more silent than me.

All I needed was his help, just his help with that fucking leak—ah but here I am telling it bolder than I felt, bolder by far with the angry voice and firm tone since we have appearances to maintain when there’s a low-hum of almost white-noise terror gripping, moving, consuming with psychopathic eyes, the kind of eyes that pose threats and all you can think to do is yell back and shout them down but they freeze you and grab you and hold you there and then it’s you with the scream face and no way out, no sound.

That leak, though, I could even hear it from the car, from the lot, over the river, over the city, that water drip       drip       drip      slow steady drip dripping from the ceiling back at the run-down yellow-brown-dying room in the building at the lot’s looming fringe and all that seemed around me were a scattered smattering of empty cars and an equally empty goddamn fucking ticket booth and that wide and snaking river with its mocking shimmers and there I was faking bold with searching scanning fearful eyes projecting solidity like how we talk our way out of jitters from the retelling of a nightmare as if it’s really something as elemental as sound that’s gonna put us back together and save us.

But that wasn’t the dream. That’s just a story, another story from another dream from another night and through that story I, teller, wondered if the dream is where I found it, if those were the words I read and, waking, knew this waking state couldn’t top it

and if in between this waking state and the next twilight moonlight recess I’d without intention find a way to stop it

and still be around to say I did, after being quiet for far too long.

Originally posted on Hijacked Amygdala here.