A few days ago I received a phone call. I cannot recall specifically everything that was said for the words, “I don’t want us to hate each other but…” rendered me blank and completely unreceptive to further explanation. Although I had known it was coming for some time, I believed it to be a manifestation of my imagination that being exclusive to my brain could never become truth and seek me out. I was wrong. And because I neglected to give it proper consideration I have found myself left with a host of involuntary perceptions that I cannot chase away, nor, much to my surprise, drown. They haunt me day and night. They laugh at me, they poke at me, and when I have fallen from exhaustion they kick me in the head until I am unconscious. But brutality has its own special perseverance that enables it to seep through the conscious and become more deadly than ever in the realm of the mind that is not controlled by the ordinary look and feel of the world. There it is free to create an unrestricted barrage of scenery and feelings that strike with a force 100 times more deadly than any physical blow could possibly inflict.

That call was from my girlfriend, living ten hours away, in a place that I used to call home. I left that place to better myself, to make life more fruitful for everyone that I loved. Distance, I have found, is a variable incompatible with the equation of love. It is elusive in that initially it makes love seem stronger almost as if each unit of space corresponded to a unit of empty longing. Over time though, the distance reverses its effect on the situation and erodes love like water smoothing stones in a fast running river. Eventually one of the partners becomes unable to hang on, begins tumbling, and severs the relationship, for better or worse. They become buoyant and float away into the mysterious and beautiful sea, the other left behind only to be buried by memories of the past and thoughts of the future like an old tire stuck in the mud at the mouth of a great delta.

Since that call, I arise every morning with tired eyes on a sweaty pillow in a room that is cold and barren. Through the sleep I can see that I am alone but the other world still lingers in my brain, its inhabitants and their actions like ghosts re-enacting the final moments before their deaths. The visions are from a dream, a dream that came the night of the phone call and has since refused to go away. It changes minutely in detail each night but the story line seldom waivers. It sticks with me the remainder of each day like the sickening burps reminiscent of a cold sausage sandwich eaten hastily for breakfast on a hung over morning.

In the dream I am standing on a street corner that I am unfamiliar with. It is cold and rainy. The night seems foreign and mean. I look at the clothes I am wearing and they fit poorly, they don’t feel good on my skin. I know I am waiting for someone but I can’t remember who or for what reason. I search my pockets for anything that will tell me where I am, or what I am doing. Then across the street I see her. She is walking with a group of our friends, a group of which I am familiar with each and every one. As I approach, remembering now that it was her I was waiting for and that she is rudely late. They look at me like a filth stranger. She looks at me with a surprised and disgusted gaze, as though I were the neighborhood retard wanting yet another embarrassing hug. I raise my hands like a beggar, unable to speak, as they turn their backs to me and keep walking. She whispers something to a man who is touching the bare exposed skin of her back. I can’t believe how close she puts her mouth to his ear. He holds her there for an extra moment, breathing deeply the smell of her hair, while returning a comment. They both turn and look at me with black sinister eyes that seem to illuminate the fact that there is nothing inside of them but doings of evil, fun for them, but knowledge that would kill me instantly if I knew.

I follow them to a restaurant where they are seated at a table near the window. I press against the window and watch as they laugh and arrange themselves. A waiter comes to the table and lies down a napkin in front of each of them. He looks as though he is saying, “Welcome back my friends, will it be the usual?” They nod and he writes on his pad. He moves with a precision and grace. Turning to walk away, he looks directly into my eye and shoots a wink that seems to linger in a moment of no momentum, of no movement to the future. The only sound is my heart and my lungs in a muffled strangling fight for breath. I suddenly become sickeningly aware of myself being on the outside. “I can see you,” I say. My breath clouds the window. Their images become faint in the condensation. Through the final small hole in the window I see her lean over to him and kiss his lips lightly. I awaken, my body clinched tightly around a pillow and shaking. A voice echoes somewhere between my ears, “But I know you don’t want to see me.”

In the shower, after mustering enough energy, to move my aching body from the bed, the visions continue . Now it is my own doing, as is the dream I suppose, but the realization does nothing to stifle my imagination. It swirls around me all day like an ominous atmospheric whirlpool sucking me, thrashing all the way, to the vortex that turns out to be the next battle with sleep. As I let the water run over my head my mind turns to her. I can see her in the shower, her head tilted back, squeezing the water from her long hair. It rolls down her glistening body washing away the sweat borne of another man. I see it run between her legs and down her beautiful thighs. Instantly I am thrown into a spasm. Emptiness from within reaches out violently to be filled with anything but what is offered. It grabs at the hooks of my existence and pulls me inward. She is smiling and has a look of deep satisfaction. I fall forward and lean my hands on my knees. My arms tremble, as do my legs. A viscous saliva stalactite hangs from my bottom lip as tears borne of myself roll from dead eyes and splash into the water heading for the drain.

For a few special moments each morning I manage to elude the ghosts but it is only because of the traffic and the heat. It is hard to think about anything when the air is scalding and you are surrounded by thousands of people trying desperately to squeeze another foot out of every six inches the lane affords them. I often wonder if my car is really there at all, if I just closed my eyes that everything would vanish leaving me in a world of white silence. I wonder if I would mind. No one seems to see me anyway. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I am on my way or coming home. It doesn’t even seem to matter where I am going. I have failed to remember the things that I have done in between.

The worst of times seems to fall on me like a blanket as the sun goes down and the lonely night begins darkening the creepy spaces outside of my window and behind my eyes. It is a blanket of lead that is heavy and cold. Like a patient waiting for an x-ray to illuminate an internal pathology, I lie naked on an examining bed of my own design waiting to see the lumps and the breaks I have known to be there by feel and intuition. It is perhaps, the most painful vision that I lie down with at night. It is likely borne of the knowledge that night is the time of intimacy, the time when people become less and less afraid to act on inhibitions. They become alone, even with others, particularly one, so that actions can be taken that might otherwise be avoided due to the possibility of discovery. And when I am not around, there is no doubt that life goes on.

It is not a dream because I am not sleeping, although, I am certainly not in control of all my faculties. I sit on the couch and stare blankly at the walls while my mind continues to play the games that have no rules. I can see her at home in the kitchen. The lights are turned low. The atmosphere is warm and inviting. At the table sits a man who bears no real face. He is sipping from a glass and watching her like a predator as she tidies up around the sink. The flickering light from a candle dances on the glass of an empty bottle of wine. She returns to the table and tips the bottle to her glass. They share a look of surprise when nothing comes out. The look on her face is curious and inviting. She folds a napkin nervously. I have seen it before and know what she is thinking. From the table they move to the living room. She slides a movie into the VCR while he sits on the couch arranging himself in a way as to leave no place other than the one of his choice for her to sit. She returns to the couch and takes that spot. She lies down on her side and leans into him. He raises his arm and lowers it softly to her side where it comes to a rest. She pulls a blanket from the top of the couch and it glides across her body, his arm shrouded within. I don’t know why I am here, watching, but I can’t stop. I can’t make them go away. I seem to be looking through glass again. I picture myself outside a set of sliding glass patio doors like a voyeur in the night. Unlike the voyeur though, I am not receiving any pleasure from these people that I anonymously watch.

The movie becomes less and less of an interest to them. I can see his arm moving beneath the blanket, massaging her. She closes her eyes and responds to his touch by turning to make herself more available, more open to his exploration. I press my face against the glass and begin smacking it with open palms. My tirade goes unheard. My mind is frantic, there is a warning I need to get out but there are no words to go with it. If the door suddenly opened and I was face to face with them, I would say nothing, I would stare at them with wild bulging eyes like a man choking on poison, staring at his assailant, a loved one with an empty vile in hand. I would reach out and grab at them knowing that when I fell I wouldn’t be getting up again. Like stone pillars they would stand as I slid down, still reaching out for hand, a piece of clothing, or just a belt loop. Now lying on the ground I can see that they were never there, they hadn’t moved towards me, but vertically, his body on top of hers. I still cannot see his face clearly; it seems to be changing from one shape another, features of every man that I have ever seen. I can see her face as well. She is beautiful. Her eyes are clinched tightly and her neck is arched. Her mouth pulses, remaining slightly open. Her hands grab at his back and squeeze the blanket, knuckles white with tension about to release. For a moment that man is me. I can see through those eyes. I grab her face and cover her mouth with mine. Her eyes open quickly. The look is one of surprise and disappointment, as if she were thinking, “How could you possibly be here?”

“I don’t know,” I think to her, “Can you see me? Do you know that I am doing this? Is this really what you are doing?”

That moment is quick and time sets me back outside the glass looking in. I am on the ground still, having fallen there before. I can still see them but everything is becoming less and less real, like my breath is leaking out and my body is starving for oxygen. I think that I know now what a soldier feels like fighting a foot war, having been shot but not knowing by whom because everyone looks the same and they all have a gun. I know what it looks like to that man as he watches the troops continue on, no time to stop, as he wonders what exactly he was doing there in the first place, and realizes he has to die on the ground far away from home. He wonders if it was worth it to come here and fight for something he would never fully understand, and I do the same. But I am not dead and no one has really tried to kill me, at least not directly. I am alone on the couch and I have lost track of time again. Night has come and snuck up on me. My evening of productivity is shot and there is nothing left to do but go back to what I must call sleep, although I am uncertain of that particular verbs validity.

I can see now that there is nothing resolute about this story, and even less of a story than that. Better conditions might have found me face to face with an unlucky friend or hapless listener who would have, no doubt, told me to cut the shit and get back to living. “These things are not exclusive to you, kid. It happens to everyone now and again,” they would say or maybe even, “Get your head out of your ass.” But as it happens I am not afforded the gentle touch of human empathy. Even so I don’t believe that I could accept that type of generic advise. In my new world of blitzkrieg technology, devoid for the moment of human sentiment, the best I can hope for is a computer generated error when saving these words. I expect that it would be something like this: ERROR WRITING TO MEMORY. To which I might sit back and think to myself, “How about that for irony.” It would be easy to convert this file to another format, maintaining, as best I could, the integrity of the original. But is that what I want to do? Would it be easier to hit cancel and start from scratch? Or would I be better suited to write something different altogether? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.