Wheels
It’s essentially like a dream, a dream I keep waking up from but can’t seem to escape.
The connotation of the word dream always seems to be positive. Meh. You know how when you’re in a dream, you’re in one place, and suddenly a second or a minute later you’re somewhere else –––– without moving, or knowing how you got there? Essentially it’s the same thing, the daily… motions I go through. I’m here, and then I’m there, I blink, and I’m somewhere else. I’m awake, and aware, but it’s all cyclical. It feels cyclical. Essentially like sleepwalking.
I blink, I’m in the backseat of a car. Blink, I’m in a classroom, blink, I feel the cold granite tile underneath me and the beads of shower water weave through strands of my hair. Blink, it’s morning. Blink, fuck this.
It’s like a different kind of autopilot, like you don’t have to tell yourself to breathe or blink ––– but all the synapses in my brain just have this fluidity where I am just devoid of any kind of conscious thought ––– I make my coffee, I put on my shoes, I take my notes down, I’m sitting on my bed, about to well, go to bed, and well, I just.. I wake up.
Sure, I’m awake, but before I sleep, I really wake up, like I literally get around to actually thinking, and I think ––– what have I done today that can be considered really worthwhile? And I get around to thinking about the burden of existence, stupid, ambitious and abstract ideas, just lying down in bed on the brink of midnight until the slightest peek of dawn escapes my blinds. Am I just a gear in the clockwork of this Earth? I mean, fuck, sure, that sounds important, but really it makes me feel so miniscule and both full and utterly bereft of purpose. Like, if by some weird voodoo magic, if I was written out of existence, the fabric of the universe would probably go haywire, but that would be just an incidental casualty, because if you really saw how my life panned out on a daily basis, it wouldn’t have been much of a loss.
Blink, I’m in front of a television set, occupied and restless –––– and I feel like art imitates life and life imitates art and it’s cyclical, but it’s a nice, beautiful kind of cycle. Like the Ptolemaic model, or major scales moving only in octaves, the energy borne of circular motion ––– or… clockwork.
Sometimes, I feel. It doesn’t matter what or how, I just do. Feel, like a verb. Through every single sense ––– I see the streetlights framing the grain of the road when I open the car window, I taste the simplest joy of ultra-processed death in a fast food takeout box, I hear that Mustang Sally bass line when I’m really listening, I smell heaven in my linens when I take them out of the laundry basket. And I feel, I feel the unmistakable warmth of your breath when I don’t realize, when the hum of air conditioning finally lulls me to sleep, I feel the crater on my pillow where your head used to be, and I bolt this consciousness. I take it back, free me from this sharp pain, and take me back to apathy, take me back to avoidance.
Because I used to move my finger from blemish to blemish, tracing some kind of system in your skin, and I used to tremble when you whispered into my nape thinking I was asleep, and I used to feel the singular focus and nature of longing, I used to melt and mold myself everyday to accommodate every crevice of the fractures in your heart, in your life, in your mind. The fluidity of desire, the fluidity of my personhood –––– it was all gone, it’s all gone, now I’m a rigid shell of who I used to be, moving in a gross, repetitive and predictable pattern, unrealized and more of a demographic than anything else.
I used to relish in delusion, in your supposedly underserved attention, while you relished in the affirmation of the heat of my cheeks, and an affectionate rush of blood and a faster pulse ––– of the state of undress, physically and emotionally. The dynamic and push-pull feeling of loving less/more.
Blink, I’m tying your shoes, blink, you’re walking away.
I don’t want you back. I’m comfortable. I’m realized. Fake it til you make it. Good posture makes you seem like a confident person, why the hell not, right?
My mother said once that time stops for nobody, or did my father say that? Or was it Jesus, or Buddha, or Pablo Neruda, or Chicken Soup for The Tardy….
I don’t want to embark on some soul-searching, Drops of Jupiter, manic pixie life changing trip to France or something. I don’t need a fucking coming-of-age self-actualization triggering plot device. I don’t need that. I don’t need some sort of off-the-grid catalytic fissure in my life.
I want to be whole again, but I want to find it in the bottom of a good cup of coffee, or the froth of an ice-cold beer with a few who have stuck with me, through the rumble of train arrivals and departures ––– the cyclical life ––– I am slowly finding dimensions, eclipsing you, these brief moments of feeling, enjoyment, dare I say excitement. Someone else’s car stereo. New cycles. Intersections.
I need to find the beauty in clockwork, once more, if not endlessly.
