Sincerely k.

 

To anyone else he would look fast asleep. He lay on top of the covers of his bed with his eyes closed and body relaxed. It was possibly a dream state of sorts, but he was suspended here somewhere between conscious and unconscious. Behind those closed eyes his mind was active. It was actually a bit more than that, his world was active.

It wasn’t always easy to get here, but it was one of his favorite places to go ever since he was a kid laying in the sunshine on the living room floor waiting to go to church. It was a sort of active relaxed state. Something like how he often heard meditation described. He hadn’t planned on being here. He just laid down on the bed and closed his eyes and slowly the tendrils of his inner world wrapped around him and pulled him in.

He lay on his bed eyes closed and he wondered how many sounds he could pick out. At first the obvious ones jumped forward. The ceiling fan whirring above him. Then the clinking of it’s two pull chains for the light and the fan speed as the centrifugal force caused them to bounce against each other. After that the hoovering sounds of the refrigerators compressor keeping the food cold. “That was was the sound of food not rotting.” he thought.

His ears started to pick up the sounds from outside of his apartment after that. There was the violent start of the crank which lifted the aluminum garage door of the condo complex across the alley outside his window. Then the zippering sound of a key being inserted into the barrel of the deadbolt outside in the hallway. A quick and fast brr-rr-rr-uupp as the cylinders inside the lock were lifted into their appropriate place in order to turn the key counter clockwise and open the door. That followed by a wind fallen slam of the door closing behind it’s tenant. That often happened when the window was open and the pressure changed as the door closed and the window let it in it’s breeze. As if God himself were giving you a hand with that one.

Slowly though all of these things started to fade away. This wasn’t a conscious choice. The sounds simply went away as if he fell into a hole. The sounds were all still there above on the surface, they just didn’t travel down into this place he was gliding into it.

Then came the sensations. There wasn’t much occurring in his body. No sharp pains, no subtle aches. There was only the quick twitch of his right bicep. There were no apparent reasons for his bicep to be twitching although his mind offered him explanations. It’s because you ate McDonald’s last night for dinner. Some part of him inside there laughed at the thought. His mind immediately tried to draw a correlation. He saw his mind often try to draw correlations about life. He assumed this explanation, like the many others, were faulty and that it came more from a sense of trained emotional guilt rather than honed reason but he loved that his mind would offer up the best it could right away. He didn’t fight this knee jerk explanation but rather appreciated it as it floated by.

He was drifting quickly now. The momentum of the fall into his inner world ramping up. He landed suddenly on a memory. An image. At first he thought of Savannah Georgia. He had only been there once for a week but it was long enough to instill a vibe that was associated with the location. He peered a little while longer and realized that the image was actually a New Orleans style breakfast place on the south side of this mid western town. It had nothing to do with Georgia at all. The defining quality though of everything occurring in the image was the sunlight. It’s bright warmth sent a ray of nostalgia across his chest.

He, of course, loved this too. The way the unconscious just seemed to be stitching memories together. It was always a wonder to him. His theory that the brain deep somewhere inside of it just bubbled up thoughts. A never tiring machine that sends things to the surface and leaves you with the job of picking them apart to see what makes sense. As these thoughts came up to the surface you could see their absurdity. A collage of fragments mixed together.

Sometimes it was like looking into a snow globe. The glass magnified specifically what you were focused on and the cost of this magnification was the distorted edges of everything else as the glass bends around it. Of course this distortion always occurred. No one ever internalized objective truth. This distortion is the things memories are made of. People often laugh at their inaccuracy as they pull memories back out of their mind, but it seems more often then not they are inaccurate as soon as the memories are place into the mind and they only go on to warp from there.

Next he’s transported to the feeling of a song. There is no image here. Only a sensation of being free. Truly free. He has a sense that he’s glad to be here again watching his mind unfurl. It’s a special place and he’s grateful for it. It’s time not spent building a narrative around the events of his life. It’s time not spent with his soul seizing up tightly in a sense of distress as it so often has done in the past. It’s a tense feeling the way your leg seizes up when you get a charlie horse.

“To kiss the soul…” the thought floated past the song. It was the beginning of a poem. Some part of him was watching himself and another part of him was trying to write a poem to describe the experience as it was occurring. Sometimes these thoughts would begin and he’d chase them only as far as he had to exhaust the energy they held. Sometimes he would end up with a really great poem or story on his hands and other times he’d just get a single line like that. It seemed like the line could lead somewhere but he didn’t have the energy to chase it down.

“I’m an overgrown child.” he thought. This of course wasn’t a new thought. He knew it was true. For a long time he felt a need to get out of this state. To “grow up” or more realistically “catch up” with people his age. He for a long while had felt that he had fallen behind on some existential set of chores but over time he had realized that this actually wasn’t the case. The truth was more that he had gotten so ahead on his chores at a young age compared to his peers it was necessary for him to regress back to here and be the child again. Just like the first line of the poem he had to simply let this energy exhaust itself instead of fighting it. He would get bored with being an overgrown child soon enough but for now he planned on indulging this current state of affairs. And that thought floated by too.

“To kiss the soul…
The world spins
And the heart beats
The shadow sins
But your lips are sweet”

The poem began to expound upon itself. An outpouring of his experience. He could try and catch it now or wait to see what else comes of it later. If it continues and rounds itself out more he would spend some time swapping in and out words that might make it more rhythmic. He’d spend time trying to sure up the syllables so it doesn’t sound lopsided. It was always a touchy process because sometimes he’d start with something he felt was raw and moving and then attempt to improve on it from there to make it a finished product. Unfortunately sometimes that finished product squeezed all the relatability out of it and turned it, instead, into a glossy yet worthless piece of plastic. He decided to let it bounce around a bit before trying to put a metaphorical bit in it’s mouth and lead it to the outer world.

He bounced again. This time to a suburban town not too far from where he grew up. His perspective was on the main drag. Not walking but rather gliding along the main street, he assumed this occurred because his memory was primarily formed in a car rather than on foot. He saw a large playground about fifty yards set back from the road. He had passed this play ground just about everyday of his childhood on the way to school. It was huge and looked like not just one castle but rather a series of fortresses. He remembered when it was being built it was such a big project that it had made the local news. Even though the playground was only a town or so over from where he lived he never actually got to go there. There was something about it making the news that almost made it even bigger in his head. A myth is like a bonsai tree, it will grow into whatever space you let it.

Just like that the childhood play mansion blinked out of existence. This, like the song and the restaurant, wasn’t a new concept when it blinked out of existence but it never failed to amaze him. It was this type of building or painting that was the best form of creativity. He sometimes likened it to playing with Legos. Each thought built on another thought until eventually you’d tear it apart and start over or make something completely different. Unlike Legos though you never ran out of pieces just as things were getting good. Also with Legos occasionally you need a piece that just didn’t exist. That never happened here. If an actual memory didn’t exist your mind would just create it and *BANG* there it was ready for you to continue. Then when you were done *POOF* it was gone. Blinked out of existence. No need for clean up. It was just gone.

Next thing he knew he was at his high school bus stop. He was standing by himself and the season was fall. It was interesting to pay attention to the season in which memories occurred. This one came up often and it was always fall. Across the street was a field strewn with fallen leaves. The field represented some infinite number of colors even though they all fell on the spectrum between dull yellow and dead brown. This of course was another trick of the mind. He watched as the field swayed with waves of leaves. It didn’t take much time to compare it’s movement to that of the sea. He loved this memory and it’s corresponding distortion. He knew it was almost entirely a fictitious recreation. He knew this partly because he’d never seen leaves move like that. More often they moved only a couple at a time as they were randomly scooped up by the wind rather than propelled by a wave like the sea. He also knew that the size of the field was distorted. The depth of the image made the field look vast but when he really considered the field in his mind he knew it should have only been about sixty feet or so. The thing that made the memory such an obvious fake though is that he could see himself in it. He was actually observing the back of himself while the externalize version of himself observed the leaves. It was a memory of how he saw himself which at best made it a work of art and at worst a flat out lie. Still though he loved it all the same.

“A lie of art..” fluttered through his mind just like the line in the poem. Maybe this would become an extension of the poem he thought. It wouldn’t surprise him. He wouldn’t mind seeing where this was going. The idea of kissing the soul had a romantic idea of self love. He had heard that it wasn’t to uncommon for people to visualize their soul as a woman. He had even tried it before despite the sense of embarrassment in doing so. The trick of it was to make it a woman you’d want to spend a lifetime with because in essence you will be. So fantasies of empty headed bimbos were out. You would want her to be something beautiful but also tough. You want her to be the type of woman that could outwit you if she had to. Her betrayal would be for your best interest or even more for the best interest of the both of you, but she’d much rather lead with the truth if she thought you would listen.

To kiss the soul
The world turns
The heart beats
The shadow sins
But your lips are sweet

A lie of art
Your deeds to me
My path set straight
By what you’ve done for me
But though I bend
I may never break
You carry me
My soul set straight

The verse was getting pretty good he thought. He always felt weird when the rhythm was off or when things rhymed too much. It made him feel like a sham when he presented it to the world, but he admired watching such a thing form while he was deep inside of here.

“I was supposed to go to the record store.” he thought and flinched. “Whoops” he thought. He knew he was on his way back out. It was just a small thing. Something he was supposed to do. That thought didn’t just bind him to the outer world. It bound him to the current outer world. Unlike all these memories that thought was a reminder of his to do list. He knew at that moment that just like he had fallen into this space dense with a dream like fog of memories and distortion that he was about to be catapulted back out.

He tried for a moment to stay. To hang on to the place where he had landed. The images quickly changed. His mother buzzing his hair in the backyard saturated in the summer heat. He must of been ten years old. They still had the old a-frame swing set up behind the shed.

He bounced again to him as an even younger child. The next memory associated with the swing set himself. The distinct and lopsided portion of he memory here was that sound of the sheet metal slide attached on the end of the swing set. It had such a unique sound. One you could recreate with a hand saw when you jiggled it back and forth quickly.

Then out again. Now it was a memory of a memory. He saw himself staring at a picture of himself of a baby standing next to the slide in diapers. He was in the dining room of his childhood house underneath the counter where he and his sister would eat breakfast. His mother baking cookies overhead in the kitchen. This memory brought sadness. It was sad because it was a happy memory and he didn’t get to come back here that often. He wanted to stay and take it in but he knew he couldn’t. It would soon disappear. With that thought he immediately began to well up with tears. Why? He wanted to go around the counter and talk to his mother? Was that it? He turned his foot to step.

*Woosh* the scene vanished and the backdrop changed. The memories were blinking by at a rapid pace now.

The girl who loved horses.
The farm.
A horse and buggy.
Playing cards.
Quilts.

Bed. His bed. He lie there for a moment. He was playing a little game with himself. He was trying to see how many sounds he could pick out. He noticed the whirring of the ceiling fan. The clinking together of the it’s two chains that turn the light on and off and control the speed of the fan. He could hear the hoovering sound of the refrigerator in the kitchen. “That’s the sound of food not going rotten he thought.

Then the violent sound of the aluminum garage door to the parking garage across the alley. “I was going to go to the record store he thought.” and stood up.