psychopomp

How does any dream begin? A slow leading of the hand into the gray space between. There is always a space between. You can't be bothered by the way the world feels or how you're sitting in your chair or how you can't take your eyes off of that one thing that they see like a star in the gray. And just like looking at a star in the night sky you squint at it to see if it's moving very slowly across the sky if it's even a star at all. This is the way to enter dream. Your body is stilled and your breath is even - it has found a rhythm intrinsic, a primordial beat, and, craning its ear, bends in to listen and keep in time. Your heart follows suit, the muscle slowing in agreement with your your breathing, like an instrument in an orchestra being told legato, legato, pianississimo.

Then it is the jawbone. Teeth held together all day finally part wistful ways, the jawbone sinking rapidly until it hangs slack, opening the cave of the mouth. The jawbone is tied however it is to the muscle of the mind, and with its slow decline, something in the middle of your skull irises open. You are assembling images now in the cutting-room of your mind's eye, sitting cross-legged on the floor, arranging brilliantly alive photographs and holding them up to the light. Each one of these is a memory, a memory that beats with sound and light. You turn the memory one way and it refracts a brilliant flash at you; you turn it the other way, the same thing happens. You become dazzled by the memory, as if in a kind of shock, sink willingly into it.

And there you are, whoever you are. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, furrow-brow and smile, laying on your side in our bed. In the dishwater-yellow of the morning, floating there. I watch you fall asleep and more than often I watch you wake up. There are nights, sure, drunken nights when I fall into bed having gone to sleep a long time ago, but more than I often I am the last one to drift into the gray. I remember I said I was smoking again and you were so angry with me. I hurt you with something I did and it was something I said I couldn't control but something which I knew I could, if I tried hard enough. I think it was that which hurt you, and that which now hurts me. In the dream I have yet to hurt you, yet to lie or cover something up, even though I'm in the business of covering things up. We've only just met. I told myself I wanted a relationship because I write about relationships but only ever the end, and I found you. I don't trust people in the world, and so I turned to another world, and I found you. We talked online for months before we actually met, in that vast, disembodied hive-mind of the Internet. I imagined our meetings as taking place in your room. When I saw all four walls for the first time, I laughed, then peered at your computer screen as if hoping to see the wall of my room displayed on your screen still. Like looking through a wormhole.

You were always patient with me until suddenly you weren't anymore. Perhaps it's because I didn't change and you did. Do you remember when I told you I felt like I was cursed? You laughed at me, and then apologized when you realized I meant it, and then apologized again. That night in the parking lot outside of that restaurant. It had rained and the street-lights seemed to blaze through from underneath the asphalt, like some eldritch arena. Our brief pas-de-deux. Perhaps it's because I always said I was wrong but mostly felt like I was right. Maybe it was the day I decided not to talk until the sun set. Maybe it was both of these things, or none of them.

In the dream, I know suddenly that I will wake up from the dream and feel nostalgia for a memory that doesn't exist. Maybe isn't even mine. Probably culled by cryptomnesia from books, movies, songs, colors. In the dream, I know I will wake up from the dream and feel shame until the morning I wake up and feel wistful. In the dream, it is July and without, it is November. There are always storm-clouds threatening and outside, on the lawn, children are playing a game they've just made up. This is why I never wanted to get out of bed in the morning, I say to you in the dream, even though we've only just met. This is why I stay. Lingering on the threshhold like someone caught in a recursive loop of goodbyes, feet pointed horizon-ward but eyes pointed back. In the dream you frown and tug at my earlobe. There is something we're supposed to be doing and neither of us mention it because it has suddenly become the least important thing. We are bubbled off from the world, a closed system, a binary star.

The mind knows nothing lasts and the image shifts and you're gone and so am I. Perhaps this is just how the memory of a dream works - you only get moments. If the waking mind could remember the entire sequence of a dream, like a movie memorized, it would cease to function normally and live entirely within that dream. After this, I only remember pieces. Different seasons, different colors. Even faces of people I've lost to the years, to communication's halt. Non sum qualis eram. On the train, there are two of you ghosts, one I lost recently and another a long time ago. I feel intense guilt radiating on the inside of my ribcage, like I'm Claudius at the dinner-table and you're Banquo's ghost. One of you still wears the beard I last saw you with, and the same blue sweater. You have an enormous suitcase and you're fiddling with something very small on the top of it. You do not notice me and I do not draw attention to myself. You're either embarking on a long journey or returning from one, I can't tell.
The other one is someone I lost very recently, but I can't make out their face. They are badly burned and their flesh crisps away like bark on a burning log. They are blaming me and I apologize, but words are never enough. I want to go back, I don't know how I got on the train to begin with. This isn't any click-your-heels moment, there's no no place like home. If I just try to will myself back to you, it'll work, I'll be right back there in the morning-room and I'll have just met you and I'll have yet to lie or cover anything up and just let me go back there and the rattle of the train stops