Misguided Temporal Perceptions of the Heart

The details of someone else's life close to yours. You see them as you see memory, the way you look back at love instead of seeing it here, now. Why is it that I can not be here in the present? My mind refuses to acknowledge that time is not just something that has passed, but that is also something that is passing before us every moment. I can not be with her because I can not be with her now. I miss her and yet she is still here.

In dreams we venture forth into the space between us, like astronauts rehearsing poems to recite to the stars once they are closer to their light. Sleep isolates our hearts, and when we wake we walk back towards the previous night, trying to retain what we forgot.

And already my heart insists on speaking in past tense. Even the future has happened before, the touch of deja-vu on quiet lips, trembling promises unkept and unspoken. Words are outlined in invisible, embroidered thread, masking meaning in layers of unseen silk. Reality underdeveloped under our distorted perceptive lens, the corners of objects lost into the next, rounded pixels of color overcrowding the screen. To speak is to breath in silent sighs, to not disturb the frequency of air, itself sleeping amidst sleepless thoughts, standing between all the things we can not see.

proximity to memory

Encapsulated within the thinnest membranes, fragile layers of memory, of emotion, so close to where we stand.

The proximity to memory: the indeterminate distance to our past. A child's hands outstretched in time, grasping the shapes of light. Light, coloring in the walls of a familiar hallway, consuming its length, its form.

The exact length of our hands outstretched, divided by floors measured by uneven ceramic tiles. Tiles molded from the softest clay, the changing patterns of a pixelled past. That it was once a part of us. That it is still a part of us. We are mere parts and processes, pulled passages from children's fables, underlined by touch, by voice, reciting syllables instead of words, sounds so close to song.

To remember: the circuitous path to an alternate route. Unbroken lines that lead us home. Homes housed only in dreams, waxy, colored lines that outline the forms of dwelling. And we are colored in through sleep. We dream back to who we are in times past. We are defined by the amorphous shapes of a scribble-coded language, numbered shapes that we forgot to color in, again. We are unfinished coloring book ending. We are prince and princess, awaiting a child's reinterpretation of reality's biased color scheme. We are hands that cannot stay within the allotted space of predefined figurines. We are torn pages of mismanaged markers.

Cheating on sleep

All along sleep awaits my return. Each day the wait feels longer. Sleep knows not what time means to itself. While we are there it lengthens our stay through dreams, entertaining us with pieces of what we have lived through, reshaping them into the unexpected narratives of our unconscious. In this way we communicate with sleep through dreams. By ignoring them we ignore that relationship, the trust that we have built throughout our entire life, severing the thread that connects us to what we need.

sharing sleep

... The way she turned the corners of speech, disappearing into a dialogue that nobody could comprehend. She was consumed by the sleeplessness that she encountered within her dreams. Awaking in between late afternoon cat naps, dosing back into the paused realities of her unconscious. Dreams dubbed in a child's voice, whispering in the language of sunsets and car crashes. The noise that she hears when she wakes up. Somewhere close to her unopened eyes, the soft breathing of a familiar sleep.

just a voice

Our words wrapped in somebody else's voice, letters leaning into the next, falling towards its unfound meaning. Careless and unattended, a voice dismembered from its mind; an anxious separation, like names whispered in sleep.

...

Just a voice, like wind passing through a ghost town, gently brushing against the neural circuitry of his mind; and memories, like branches extended and curling at the inner concave of his unconsciously surrendered dreams.

dreaming home

picture by Amy Dover





In that moment of time, where time itself had a different name, named after all the places we have been; and in one instance time was even named after you. We moved back into the old house that we grew up in, displacing our childhood within our minds, even then we contemplated shedding the skin that we had held onto for so long.

I stood in one place for a long time, yet movement was for me somewhat internal, divided by the immensity of what memory cannot recall, and my body felt as though gliding along one of those moving sidewalks that you often see at airports. As a child I avoided getting on that shifting ground that made my stomach cringe as if riding a roller coaster. I wanted only to stay in one place, to be able to ground myself as a tree does, my roots delving deeper into the soil that I first learned to walk upon.

In the beginning, when the last of our belongings were carried out of our home, I remember my mother overworking herself as usual, trying to clean the dust that had settled over 16 years. This was the beginning because I didn't want out our home to be an end, to be placed alongside a punctuatory mark that denoted the last of my mother's tired breath. A small dot that could not be erased. In Japanese, the end of a sentence is marked by a small circle. Encasing emptiness within its constricted space. A line that circles and meets where it began.

Years later, every time I visited Lubbock I would drive by our house. And just before I turned the corner I would hold my breath, unsure if I would start crying or just stay silent and drive slowly as I usually do. All the small changes that I wouldn't even really notice. The color and subtle shape of the bush that aligned the doorway sidewalk. Maybe even the color of the house itself. The window where I snuck out of as a teenager, to stay out late and vandalize public property with spray cans and skateboards.

We didn't really move back into that house. Only I did, secretly, once a month or so within my dreams. A recurring dream with a different narrative. Different characters and different endings. Only the house stayed the same. My subconscious mind constructing dreams out of everything I lived through. Placing pieces on a moving sidewalk, a long extended walkway moving backwards against time, stretching so long that I am unable to see where it all goes to. Yet even standing still at the entrance of my dream, I know that at the end is our home, with my mother busily moving boxes around as usual. But just this once, she is moving them back inside.