I woke up yesterday with this great gift. Usually on Sundays, I wake up with an apocalyptic mind. Yesterday was different.
I was sleeping when I got the phone call. When I answered, I was still sleeping, if you follow. Someone was yelling on the other end, so angry at me - my actions, my lacking responsibility. The voice told me to come to the hospital and fast.
When I arrived, there was this line of people waiting for me, eyes like razors as I made my approach. And they were judging, hostile. I felt awful, not so much as for what I'd done, but for what I would have to live with. When I got to the room and turned inside, I found this girl, and she was holding a baby. I recognized her straight away - a girl from my past. She was beautiful, so beautiful. Durbs, you woulda been so proud - a mag girl on many occasions. I remembered a distant feeling, lusting after this...her and her face and her body like possibly no other I had known. But when we spoke, I'd float away. We went to dinner, maybe a movie a long time ago and I remember this numbing feeling crawling over my body and mind, so un-held. I remember taking her to bed, knowing I wanted to but shouldn't. And I remember that being that, knowing it was going to turn out exactly like that.
Everyone in the room started in on me, yelling and screaming, evidently pissed that I had slept through the birth of my child. I looked at the mother and she was indifferent, soul-less, like they or I or everything had sucked it from her. They were yelling and screaming and I felt like I was dead or wanted to be.
I woke up a few minutes after 8 and didn't move, let it settle that what happened in my sleep wasn't my reality. I considered the possibility that laying in bed not being a father was my dream, that the alternate reality was in fact, mine.
It wasn't. It isn't. I was okay.
...
It's Monday. I woke today before 7 to start back in on my two darling, deviant lovers. I woke up with some shit in my guts, still some remnants of the recent girl, one held in distantly higher esteem. The fact that she's still here is marveling and maddening. I want to go to the bathroom and puke her out, all of her - be clean again - for moments. But then comes back my thirst for self destruct, something inside me and all it wants to do is embrace the shit, teach me how to love it like I would my would-be bastard child.
Good things, I'm in. Promise.
...
This room is dark and long and would echo if you let it. These headphones swallow my head. This instrument beneath my hands makes me strong. My heart is bleeding. This feeling feels like home. I'm home. Now I eat the world.
