dance me

I often have dreams about this place. And when I say dreams, I think I mean nightmares. This place has the look of a nightmare. It is surreal, and scary. It is dark, and dusty, and like my dreams, the room reflects me darkly. Like a mirror made of oil, or blood.

Dust, or ash, colors everything a duller grey than the concrete underneath it, and the mixed odor of cigarettes and sweat makes me wince. It’s the smell of a slow death. The type you get when a person runs his car his garage and count back from ten, or in a room where an old man is left to rot by his children.

In my dreams, I am the figure now sprawled on the ground, cigarette butt in between my fingers, bottle of amber liquid standing next to my spread arms. But whoever this person was, he had led a far sadder life. His near naked state and his gnarly matted hair spoke of a long hard life. And the saddest part of all is that I am the only person who will know of his death. And I don’t want to imagine the people who knew of his life. For they left him here, alone

His ashtray is full; he must have forgotten to empty it before he died.

I am here to bury this man, or to cremate him, or to toss his body into a river. This man planted the dreams in my head when I was a child. He chose me to perform his last rites, before I ever knew him. And the reason I am standing here, not moving, is that I can’t understand the reason for his choice.

Am I going to die like this?

Because when I dream, I am the figure on the floor.

I can’t say that I have lead a great life. But to imagine that I will die like this man, this rotten shell of an existence, makes me feel cold.

If I don’t give him a funeral, can I escape this fate? If I don’t accept his death, maybe I can change mine.

Lying to myself never worked so I stop. When you feel a cold this intense, on a hot summer day, you know you’re in the presence of truth. The mind cannot accept this scene, pulled from its darkest places, and made real in concrete and flesh.

When I lift him onto my shoulders, his last breath escapes, and the cold deepens. I am locked into this reality now. I have taken his last breath as my own, and someday I will breathe it into a concrete room like this one, or into the ear of another hapless fool like me.

To die like he lived, it was the one message the dreams always made clear to me. He wished to die like he lived, and who am I to deny him that.

I drop his body into a steel barrel, and pour the still full bottle of cheap booze over him. I add a bottle of gasoline I usually carry around. And in the dying light of the sun, I set him ablaze. I light a fag on the flames, and speak a few words. It only seemed proper.

As I leave, I make a mental map to this place; I’m going to die here after all. Don’t want to forget a place as important as this.

Lying so close and yet so far I awoke lightly. And as my eyes adjusted to the dim glow of the moon I found a mass of raven threads slowly beginning to appear, each hair like a web, cast upon the bed in a flowing pattern. The light caught each thread and reflected back a thousand memories of morning.

I looked up to gaze at the weaver and she turned to me, eyes closed but ever so softly, a smile.

In this moment I am between the waking and the dreaming. Between mind and body. And I fear to awaken further.

Staying in between just to remember her tender smile and the heat of a night spent outside myself.

Staying here so that I will not awaken to a reality that doesn’t fit this dream.

It’s always hard to find words to start a story. Finding the right ones that avoid cliche and give the reader hope of profound revelations locked within the paragraphs.

It’s easier in the epic stories, the great ones with sweeping battles of morality within absolute worlds, the rules are set, and the words at the start only serve to fill the page.
But with the smaller, timid stories that you have to coax out of a bottle of rum and a pack of cigarettes, those stories need to begin like they’re dying to be told.

These are the ones I treasure.

I don’t want to say I’ll love you forever cos I don’t believe in forever. Forever gives me too much time. And in time I fear I’ll take you for granted.

I want to love you until I can’t anymore. Everyday anew.

Falling again and again for your smile laugh eyes.

Instead of an infinity of grey days, I want to make a handful of days that I remember every color smell touch sound of.

I will love you today, tomorrow, and the day after.

I will count our life by the moments.

 Before you start, I deperately need ideas on how to proceed on this.I deeply love writing this story. Anything, comments, critiques, bashing, will help. Go crazy. Take your time. Enjoy.

Dying. It is written about in the bible, quran, torah and any manner of religious and philosophical text.
Dying is such a mystery that it belongs solely in the realm of the unexplained.

Does dying happen in one burst? Or does it happen in stages, over a period of time? These are the thoughts that flew through my mind.

For I was dying, and what else is there for a man to do at this point but to contemplate the reapers gift?

I sat on a bench overlooking the sea, and I felt spent, powerless, as expected of a man on the last legs of his life.

In the space of a blink another man appeared beside me. We stared out into the ocean, and light from the sun made my eyes water. I flexed my neck, feeling a crick that had been there for years, and I inhaled the warm salty air. The other man turned to me.

“It’s begun,” the man said, in a calm voice.

“I know” I replied.

The finals verse of my life had begun.
And like a sunset, the darkness overtook this scene.

I was in my bedroom at home before I realized it, with my wife at my side. She noticed my eyes opening and quickly wiped away her tears and put on a brave smile.

“Harry, you’re awake.” she said in a shaky voice as she leaned in closer.
“Here, drink this.” She raised a glass to my dry lips and I sipped gingerly.

I felt as if I should have told her something, but nothing came to mind. And as quickly as it appeared, this scene faded to black.

Touch

My eyes flickered open, and I was in a bed, but I was many times younger.
My body was covered in sweat, and my hips were bucking against my will. And the woman entangled in my limbs spoke to me.
“Touch is always the first to go,” she said, as she draped her arms around my neck, “when a man dies.”
Her fingernails raked my back, leaving lines of fire. Her lips brushed my cheek, and moved to my ear. “Because touch is always the first to awaken” she whispered.

“Touch flares to life at the start of manhood, when every touch AROUSES the soul,” she moaned, “for I am your Touch, I am the caress of your lovers, I am the pain of your life, personified”
It was then that I realized that her lips weren’t moving, that the words emerged from her touch.

Every touch spoke to me.

“We are in your memories, or should I say, OUR memories.” she gasped. But the words were garbled as hearing her became even harder over the noise of our ecstacy, ”Seeing as your other senses and I define your life” she said.

The thrusting became more frenzied, the moans grew in volume and at the apex of our joint climax, the scene shifted.

We’re standing on a pier where the sky is the color of wet concrete and the ocean has lost all pretense of being blue. The woman, who is my wife, is standing several feet ahead of me. She looked back at me and smiled, and like all those years ago, I ran to meet her, to hold her hand. When our hands met, I heard the voice again.

“Her hand was so warm.” She said, in a calm tone. “You always marveled at that. That no matter how cold it was her hands were always warm.”

Minutes pass, and we were lost to the moment. The infinite ocean stretched out before us as the sky darkened, promising the fury of an immense storm. But we were safe. Hand in hand, we were safe.

The familiar darkness encroached on us, from the edges of my vision I saw it crawling in. In the last moment, I tightened my grip, trying not to lose this place. But it did no good. It was gone, lost to the darkness.

Back in the room, my hand tightened, mimicking the memory. But I couldn’t feel the warmth of her hand anymore. The sensation had left me. And soon, so did the scene.

Sound

For a moment, it felt like I was still in the void of my mind. But then a wall of sound and light rose around me.
Noise flooded my world, sounds from every imaginable source, from every imaginable direction washed over me. The light flared so bright that it hurt me through closed eyes. I raised my hands in surrender; for it burnt away at the core of my being.

And as suddenly as it began, it stopped. And the sound of laughter took its place. “Beautiful isn’t it,” said a deep resounding voice, “the sounds from your life. The orchestra of your existence and the noise of your soul.Composed and conducted by yours truly, for your listening pleasure”
I noticed then a pair of eyes hanging in the darkness that moved towards me. The face around them slowly filled in, and the body followed suit. But he was hard to look at; he seemed to be part of the darkness, as if he wasn’t even really there, like his body didn’t possess any proper border and the color of his skin bled into the surroundings.
But I had no doubt that his eyes belonged to a madman. A man long detached from reality.
As if on queue, the man started prancing about the dark stage with wild, exaggerated movements.
“People don’t realize how big a role Sound plays in their lives” he said while prancing about like an idiot to music only he could hear, not realizing I wasn’t paying attention.
His movements reminded me of a child rehearsing a dance, awkward, but full of life. His movements were hard to follow, and I could only be sure of him when his eyes faced me.

I wished that he would stop; his dance made me dizzy.

And as if in response to my thoughts, he stopped mid-step and walked towards me.
“And you’re just like all the rest of them,” he said angrily. “You don’t realize that Sound comes from a deeper place than anything else.”

He slammed his hand to my chest, to feel my heart beat, and as he did that, the sound of my pulse started to emanate from the void around us, resonating with the heart in my chest.

If anyone ever explained to you what dying felt like you know what I felt. It felt like dying, in fast forward and rewind, with parts that slowed down to a crawl.

The beating of the twin hearts grew in volume, and I thought that I would not survive that encounter, until the beating erupted into a cacophonous sea of voices.

“Have you ever heard the voices of your heart?” he asked me, his voice barely audible over the sound of the crowd. “The voices of your heart are the voices of the people in your life.” he said, his voice slowly gaining volume over the waves of noise. “At least the ones that mattered enough to leave an imprint in your mind”

The sound around us began to die down as individual voices began to drop away. Soon enough only a handful remained, and finally one voice rose up, clear as crystal and loud as life.

“There’s something about us, don’t you think?” it said in a girl’s voice so achingly familiar to me, but just outside the grasp of my recall, “something brilliant and special and lovely”

“ Harry, do you recognize thiiiis voice?” Sound said in the mocking tones of a game show host, “this voice that kept you awake every night. This voice that told you she loved you every day.”

A sad realization dawned on me.

And I remembered her name.

“Lisa” I said, “Lisa my high school girlfriend.”
“Lisa who I knocked up during prom” I said.

“Thaaaaats right, Lisa McPreggers who you KNOCKED up and abandoned” said Sound.
I didn’t have to take this.
This was my mind after all.

“FUCK YOU” I shouted. I ran into the void, hoping to escape this place and wake up like before. I ran till I was out of breath, and there was Sound, right in front of me, where I left him.

Sound smiled grimly. “Tssk, tssk Harry, you ran away from her once, and even now you run” he said,he leaned in towards me, and his menacing eyes glared me into submission. “Time for you to man up.”

I was aware then of the sound of crying. My heart sank when I saw another figure slowly appear, crouched on the ground.

It was Lisa.

“Heeeere’s Lisa; after getting your son ripped out of her” he said.

“I..I..didn’t know she…” I said, incapable of saying more.
“You knew, you always knew.” he said “All those sleepless night imagining this…particular…soun”

“HARRY!” screamed this figure of Lisa through tears, interrupting Sound mid-word, “HARRRYYYY!”

I wanted so bad to hug her, and say apologize to her till I had no more voice, or till my heart gave away from her pain.

“Then do it,” said Sound “we have all the time in the world here.”
He gestured around to the void as if he could see details in the dark.
“Our duty as your senses is to show you the things and memories that defined you” he said “but seeing as I’m a stand up guy, I’m giving you the chance to bury this skeleton”

And for the first time since I came here his voice wasn’t mocking me.

I took a step forward, then another, and crumbled to my knees.
My hands reached for her and I pulled her to my chest.
She didn’t stop crying, and her tears called mine out in torrents.

Sound raised his arms in the pose of a conductor, and Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies began to play in the void.
The piano chords of the intro played to the tempo of mine and Lisa’s hearts. I tightened my embrace, and her tears stopped.
I knew then that I was meant to carry her anguish to my grave. I had become her shaman, her soul-eater.
Or should I say mine, because I was meant to take this pain from her decades ago.

Lifetimes ago.

The cold of the void faded away, Sound faded away in reverse and finally so did the quivering tear soaked figure of Lisa, my first love.

I was alone in my mind, with only the dying sound of Erik Satie’s piano left.

Soon that too was gone.

My eyes fluttered open, and the tears I had in the void were still on my face.

I looked at my wife, sleeping peacefully at her post beside me with her head resting on my lap.

“Audrey” I said, even though I couldn’t hear my own voice, “I wish I could have given you children” I raised my hands with its dead skin and stroked her hair gently.

I wished then that Touch had not left me yet, I cried because I couldn’t feel her hair anymore.

I closed my eyes, hoping that maybe the feeling of her hair would pierce the veil of my dead skin the next time I awoke.

(to be continued)

I want to kiss you.
shadow your jaw like against touch.
touch you scent of musk.
saltwater and sea foam clean.
want to kiss you near God.
Amongst strangers I dare either to stop me.
Keep me.
Want to kiss you bitter.
Tired of waiting, wondering.
Want to kiss you empty.
Steady as forever.
Small as favor.
Maybe kiss you curve where shoulder meets neck or silk of throat.
Perhaps rough of chin, inside elbows, wrists, then rest, smooth of chest.
Back, hip to hip.
Dip of belly.
Want to hold you and twine like vows.
Palm against palm.
Fingers laced and waiting.
I want to kiss you unbroken, before too many hearts snap like dried and dead things.
This longing, like fire, like hunger, like nothing before or since.
Just one, small, solitary kiss.
No questions.
No worries.
No words.
Just a kiss.
Quiet.
Quick.
Subtle.
Silent.
It’ll probably speak volumes.