I Remember Only To Forget…

Time is among the many things wasted. We can’t predict how much of it we have, yet we sit there, spaced-out, staring into the nothingness of some la-la day-dream that’ll never come true and we just let it go by. Time gets away quickly, and you can never get it back. I have these awesome, wonderful, beautiful stories in my head but by the time I go to write them down they’re never as powerful as they were when I dreamt them up. They exist somewhere else perfect, and when they need to come out, something happens. The ideas shrink. The words lose their meaning and it’s never the same.

The process reminds me of Willy Wonka when Mike TV is blasted overhead into millions of black and white pieces only to reassemble in a much smaller version of his former self. Ah, I don’t know what I’m trying to say, here. The mind is just going and going and it has a mind of its own tonight and it’s calling up the past. It wants me to remember.

I never really went to sleep that night. How could I? Sometimes I think I’ll never sleep again. Sometimes I think the whole thing was just one big movie that’s gotta end soon, but it never does.

My head hurts when I think like this because there are infinite possibilities that are all interchangeable with one another. You can move the pieces around and fit them together however you like. You are in control of what you create. To be the maker of things and make all things impossible — possible, like a dream.

I come to my senses and realize it isn’t a dream. It isn’t some illusion or hologram, it’s my life. And it hurts. It hurts the same way it would hurt if razor sharp teeth of a cannibal sank into your skin and tore down the flesh walls that would eventually leave a permanent scar. So I’ll just avoid the cannibalistic teeth of life and hide in sleep until it comes around again and I see him in my mind and he’s lying there, stiff, eyes beaten swollen and lips sewed shut. The lightning bolt cracked skin on his temples are caked with brown make-up and his head is oddly misshapen with many golf-ball sized lumps. He is unrecognizable. He is not sleeping. He is not resting for a moment. He’s dead in all the coldness there is in being dead. And he will never wake up at seven AM on a Saturday and call me at seven thirty just to piss me off. And I will never see him skateboard down the street, tripping over the torn-up bottoms of. his own pants, laughing, and waiting on the long, long lines of the lower east side clubs in the paper thin fidget air of cruel December. And he’ll never dance again in the only way he knew how to dance, spinning on the floor, legs windmilling wildly — and this is the only time I can see him, in the memories my mind shows me like a television program, and these re-runs are fading quickly as time places more tired grooves into my skin.

I was nineteen years old when my closest friend was killed. I didn’t want this to be real. And I still don’t. So maybe I’ll close my eyes again and pretend I’m somewhere else, maybe someone else… maybe. Maybe I’ll even start it like this:

It began as a dream, or so I thought…

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