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Last night, when finally I found sleep, I dreamed one of those dreams that’s too hyper-realistic (at least realistic on a psychic self-awareness level) to fool even a sleeping mind, one of those dreams that plays like a movie and even in the dream you think this is like a movie, in a direct inversion of the usual workings and tendencies of dream-logic, which is slow and fuzzy and gullible in an almost endearingly naïve and child-like way. Except even in the dream you know no one in their right mind would make a movie like the vision you are immersed in, either because it would be impossible to produce, or, more likely, would bore even the staunchest audience of experimental film connoisseurs and impeccably opinioned collegiate art/film school types. But despite all this, despite beginning to realize in the dream that it in fact embodies everything contrary to your recent proclamation of its filmic nature, you keep on self-referring to it as movie-like, if nothing else than to save face in a bizarre masturbatory way, considering that no one is there in the dream to judge you except yourself. It was the kind of dream that when you awake from it, assuming that you awake directly after and don’t dream more before waking, takes a little bit longer to leave your gradually brightening consciousness than dreams usually do, fleeting things that they are. The kind of dream that when it vanishes in the morning, evaporating like tendrils of mist off sun-kissed asphalt after a cloudburst, it leaves a physically felt, albeit momentary, hole. Except this dream stayed with me longer than that. A whole day, in fact. In this dream I lay with my eyes closed, back flat against my bed like I never sleep, feeling the cool texture of cotton sheets on my arms and flat-down palms and the backs of my knees. Somehow, I was absolutely confident that I was in fact in my bed, in my room; no doubt something about the weight of the air, and that sixth sense, someone-is-watching-you electric field feeling of knowing exactly where familiar walls are out there beyond closed eyes. The fan chopping above me made a sound much akin to that made by dragonfly wings, and sucked air towards the blurred radius of its blades, making the hairs on my body reach towards the ceiling. From beyond the glass of my two windows, there was no sound of wind, no cars rumbling or buzzing or swooshing or otherwise traveling down the street. The only sound I could hear, besides my own wet heartbeat rushing in the capillaries of my inner ear, was a similarly natural throb of frogs or toads. I became aware of the amphibian vocalization steadily; it started as a subtle and seemingly far-off hum, sounding hollow and weak with distance. Not quite a croak, more like a bird’s chirping, but accented with a certain liquid gurgle. Its pulsing seemed to travel nearer and nearer in a kind of aurally exponential increase, loudening slowly at first and then picking up steam until it reached a sonic plateau, freakishly loud and very close to the walls of my second-story room, a constant tidal roar like nightmarish Tibetan chanting. The frog-chorus, for I was reasonably confident even in the dream that only frogs, and not toads, make sounds of the sort I was hearing, although I wasn’t, and still am not, one hundred percent on that, rattled the glass with an amplitude driving its swampy timbre that could have only been produced by countless numbers of amphibians. I’m actually not sure if there is anything more than a superficial difference between frogs and toads, no real taxonomic/biological distinction. Again, not one hundred percent on that. As I lay in by bed with my eyes near-cemented shut, I envisioned an expanse of bulging, vocalizing frogs extending to a dark horizon, the curvature of the earth outlined and unsmoothed by the squirming sea covering the planet’s surface. The moon glinting off so many slimy backs. And the collective, multi-species call was enormously, bone-rattlingly, near-ridiculously loud. I could feel it vibrating in my skull, so that it became hard to tell if the sound was in fact external, instead of say, a fantastical and horrible echo feedback of the tiny popcorn sounds that I have always imagined accompanying the electrical snaps of synapse functions. There was no light behind my eyelids, as I squeezed them shut, not even the usual concentric rings that somehow explode from your eyes themselves even when you’re in complete darkness. I had never experienced dark like this before. In the dream, I lay perfectly still, seeing nothing and hearing only the amphibian throb outside my room, and thinking about how audience-like the appreciation of these two details was. I slowly, or at least as slowly as a dream will allow, began to realize that there was a weight on the bed to my right. This fact suddenly superceded all others; the frog-roar was mere background white noise compared to my acute tack-point awareness of a distinct and corporeal weight next to me on the bed. Dream-logic made an appearance as I realized it was impossible to open my eyes. Not as in I was physically incapable of the act, but more like I would have been breaking an unwritten and absurdly common-sense law. As impossible as deciding the laws of gravity and all their implications were simply tiresome and no longer applied to you, and floating gently up to the moon, which really is made of Gouda. I also knew that if I simply reached to grope out an understanding of what exactly was depressing the starboard half of my mattress, the mysterious weight would disappear. And so I lay immaculately still, willing the surface of my skin to receive and transmit any slight vibrations, changes of pressure in my right-side airspace, heat, cold, etc etc. Minutes passed, or at least what seemed like minutes. The frog-roar slid a little into the forefront of my consciousness, and my skin told me nothing. And then there was something, slight enough to seem imagined: a tremor felt in the flesh of my back, transmitted through the springs of the mattress. It persisted. As the frogs, or at least my perception of them, threatened a crescendo, I realized (in a flash like a cartoon lightbulb over the head) that the vibration I was feeling through the mattress was the steady rhythm of a pulse. In the dream, my own heart leapt. And then I felt a change on the dermal length of my right arm. A subtle warmth like a sunset’s last weak rays on your face. Excited and feeling daring, own dream-heart pounding and interfering with the through-the-mattress pulse, I moved a finger rightward. The warmth increased. I dared another finger, then ventured to risk a wrist-flex that positioned my hand perpendicularly to its arm and the rest of my body. With each movement, the heat to my right grew more intense. When I finally mustered the courage to shift my whole arm, I felt a mirrored shift in the mystery weight, distinct movement towards my person. The warmth was noon-sunlight-strength, and the frog-roar was louder than ever and now undeniably emanating from within the boney confines of my own cranium. My arm inched towards the mystery weight, and the mystery weight inched towards me. Judging from the familiar dimensions of my bed, as well as the heat, which was now like the blast of air from a quickly-opened oven sustained indefinitely and only getting hotter, my fingertips were only millimeters from white-hot physical contact with whatever was lying on my mattress with me. My mind was made up. The frog-roar was echoing in waves, surging like the ocean inside of head, my ears. I was going to close the gap. My brain fired off an executive order, my muscles twitched in recognition and affirmation. And then I woke up.
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Inside my head I am screaming. Screaming at my own relentless internal vocalizations, screaming at them to please shut the hell up, screaming for some peace. Screaming at the walls, this body that is now rebellious, a cage, not mine anymore, not mine to own or control or lay claim to anymore, a rusty and barnacled anchor that I am chained to, screaming at it to break the bond, as it drags me deeper and deeper down. Screaming at the hours passing too quickly, screaming at my own inability to ignore the clock, at that curiosity that tugs and tugs at the back of my thoughts, so every time I think I’ve almost made it to one night’s good sleep, I chance a look and then all I can think about is the fact that 15—no—17 minutes have passed without any memorial or product or promise of imminent slumber. Screaming at the noises of the house, seemingly nocturnal, oh so silent in the middle of the day when the world beyond these four walls is just as noisy, just as alive, coming out to feed at night, the wheezing vents and the creaking studded beams and the hissing crackling carpet recovering from footsteps and the branches clawing against the windows and the fans in various rooms making an indescribable sound and the water rushing in the pipes like blood and maybe even a drippy plunking faucet all in conversation with each other, oblivious to their suffering audience. Screaming at the bold happiness encroaching externally every day, malicious, high-contrast, insufferable joy. Screaming at the time wasted, past, present and future. Screaming at my imagined screaming. Screaming at everyone else who must be feeling just like I do, and thus feeling like no one else feels like they do on the whole vastness of the globe. Screaming at too-easy definitions for too-complex things. Screaming at my own never being able to let go, to forget, to forgive, to get past, to move on, to chill out, to lighten up, to cool down, to live a little, to make my peace, to say my piece, to tune in, to really sniff out the problem, to apply, to meet halfway, to examine, to think of someone else, to turn that frown upside-down, to take my own advice, to be honest, to stop fucking myself over, to quiet the waterfall roar that’s always whooshing inside of me, to stop making plans that will never come to fruition, to really fight like I mean it, to hold on, to care, to live anything resembling a life, to stop lying to myself. Outside of my head, I am lying in bed, calmly and cheerfully writing, as the sky brightens and the birds sing glory to a new, beautiful day.
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My skin is by the time you read this cold and still, by my own design. This was not an accident. This is by my own design. This cannot be a surprise. I have endured enough I think of realizing that there is nothing on my own particular brand of horizon. In fact, there is no horizon. Every new day is a cruel joke, every bit of information I, spongelike and improbably eager, absorb, is a waste. A doomed transmission. Strength (the one thing I’ve been encouraged to have besides hope [see below], and really just another meaningless hook on which to hang my existence, like it really manufactures enough self-satisfaction to go on, like it’s something to be proud of) just delays the inevitable, is an unwise area to which to delegate effort and attention, being nothing but a mask for fear and unwillingness to accept what’s certain. The breath I take in is the same air breathed, because nothing is wasted on this fucking planet except for time, for generations of humans in suffering and joy, and general humanity. The breath I took. There is no hope. Hope is dependent on a future. And the future doesn’t exist. It is only passing, and unreachable; it is only eventually the present. And the present for me is definitely not dressed with hope. Can’t you see how it’s all a cycle? Was all a cycle? That there was no way out save one, because there was never going to be any improvement? There is no improvement. There is no better. There was no better. Even now at the end, you can see, I have trouble distinguishing between the past and the present. There is only one difference between the two and that’s what drove me to this: what’s past is better. I had trouble distinguishing. At the end. You can say that, in the future (ha!), about me. It’s as good a reason as any. Maybe better than some, better than most. This is done now. This is past. I want to be forgotten. I know this is impossible. Try.
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There are times when I think I can still smell health, which does, you must believe me, have an odor. You just have to be unhealthy for a long time to notice its absence, the air it leaves empty around you smelling like nothing except slightly sweet decay, which you realize is just your own being getting older, shedding cells, wellness sloughing off, breaking down, dying, much faster now than anyone around you, losing tiny bits of itself, time, whatever. And I’m not talking about long illness type of unhealthy. Not long enough, no sense of finality. I’m talking about the kind of unhealthy that becomes the baseline, that redefines how you view health-related occurrences and issues, that reconfigures your understanding of health itself as a concept. The kind that isn’t just a framework for your life, or the foremost detail, but is your life. That kind of unhealthy. Antihealth. Health smells like trees. Like sidewalks and ovens. And dirt, and paint long dried and seltzer water and notebook paper and a lot of other things (with no doubt serious psychological/nostalgic/historical/personal implications) all mixed together into one unique scent. And I can still smell it, lingering in front of me, coyly, invariably when I am at my least healthy (which is, in itself, saying something). I am reduced to tears, horrible self-pity, which mutates into self-loathing, which mutates into self-pity into self-loathing into self-pity and so on and so on etc etc etc etc etc at its olfactory appearance. Memories, dreams of the time before have this scent associated. I read once that scent is the sense most tied to memory. The smell of health is its most defining feature; health otherwise is just an absence, an absence of problems, of conditions, of abnormality, of confusion, of (most important) awareness of physicality/reality, reality being the fact that you face an infinity of tiny deaths before the big one, that “You” are nothing but electricity surging through meat. It’s such a tired conceit that health is taken for granted, but completely and profoundly true. Health is taking for granted. And of course the scrim behind which you can forget all the promises you made while praying, unwell, antihealthy, suddenly hyperconscious of the fact that you take health for granted, and saying God (or whatever) let me make it through this the worst of it, and I swear I will never again not think of health (relatively speaking in many, including my own, cases) and try oh God to be thankful. The point is that the smell is a lie wrapped in an untruth. Health is no longer a fixture of my life. Whatever sense I have of its odor perfuming the nitrogen-oxygen intake of my nose is sheer illusion, bullshit, my mind playing cruel tricks on me, a sign of madness, and nearly unbearable. Sometimes, and I know this sounds pathetic, because really it is, I lie in my cell of a bed and dread smelling the smell of health. As in I will lie on my side feeling drool collect in the pocket of my slackening cheek, and hope (pray is far too strong of a word, given my fairly certain and field-tested theology, or lack thereof) that I don’t smell the smell of health. Brain cells are occupied, burned up in this process. Time is spent. Because health is not with me, never returning to me. What lies ahead is decline, or, worse, stasis. Smelling health would be smelling an untruth, something that is no longer part of my reality, no longer carries any real weight except for the fact that it is absent. An absent absence, only noticed because of its absence. Health is not an object, or a symptom, or a condition; it does not exist. It is itself a lie, created in hindsight wistfully after the proverbial shit has proverbially hit the proverbial fan. How can any living organism be said to be healthy when death is a constant, an inescapable nonvariable? How is mortality not the very definition of antihealth? How are decay, decline, and the countless lies that cover up the whole process not respectively mourned and sobbed over just as much as the capital-D Death, which is the only completely knowable, predictable installation of existence? It’s sickening (pun potentially intended). The worst part? I think my sense of smell is getting better. Like that old awful cliché about losing one or more senses or abilities and the other growing and expanding to pick up the slack. But what exactly have I lost to “gain” this new proficiency? Besides…
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I heard a little non-joke somewhere once. Maybe TV. There was no setup, at least none that I can remember. And the punchline isn’t really a punchline. Here it is— A psychiatrist approaches, assumingly flustered or likewise agitated funnily we’re to believe, his nurse, who’s been apparently having some exterior, off-screen chats with some exterior personage or another, which chats the MD has happened to eavesdrop upon. He approaches her and says: “Just say we’re very busy. Don’t keep saying it’s a madhouse.” I suppose what’s implied here is what’s funny—the (assumed to be numerous and active) also-eavesdropping patients whose progress has probably been halted or irrevocably reversed by being called “mad,” which thus makes the Dr. and his nurse’s jobs that much harder, probably really approaching madness, etc. But I don’t really find it funny. The whole little flawed thing relies on the jokee’s recognition of the literal (as opposed to the real-life) distinction between “very busy” and “madhouse.” As an observant outsider, an objective and decidedly anti-busy person, one in a position to note at least some of the frenzy of those capable of real business, I can say without a doubt that I don’t see any significant difference.
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