42

in the dream we are in new york, it is daytime but there is the sense that it will be night soon. we are walking in the impending nighthood and we are walking to a place where we can dance, a place where we don't have to just walk anymore. we want to go dancing. we want to move our legs over a floor in ways that would seem very strange over a pavement. we don't want to alarm the pavement or the people on other parts of the pavement. we are waiting patiently for a floor that can receive the leg and body movements that we want to do. we want to do it together.

and then there it is, in the sky, directly in front of us: the alien ship. something seems to be ending: the world, time, the people, our plans. for a minute i panic and think "i should wake myself up now." then i think "i don't have to wake myself up because i know it's a dream."

i turn to you. the alien ship is still there, hovering in perfect detail and morbid intent. i turn to you and i say:

"will you be tired tomorrow if we dance tonight?"

we will be too tired, we decide.

we turn around and walk back towards some hypothetical shared space, and we feel good

41

I can’t perfect the logistics of the apocalypse, but here is the rough sketch that has been looping in my brain for the past few weeks:

all of the people go to bed at night. they do it with the intention of achieving sleep. all of the people are sleeping.  the people begin to feel cold. they pull their blankets up tightly around them, slightly bothered but not enough to fully wake. it grows even colder. instead of waking up they insist on sleeping fitfully, like when you put forth extreme effort to fight the onset of middle-of-the-night nausea via a strong commitment to evading consciousness via remaining horizontal. the people in the logistically flawed apocalypse grow colder and colder throughout the night, clutching their blankets and loved ones closer and closer, and for some reason they don’t know they are dying, they don’t know that something has happened to the sun and the thing is causing some fundamental changes that are enabling a large scale, silent passing. we go quietly, and with a humility that goes unrecognized, because we are all dead and therefore we are all severely humble
---
thought to myself while gchatting:
you make me smile with teeth
you don’t know anything about me
I have been obsessed with greenland for a very long time
mostly with ideas about greenland
I have been obsessed with very specific ideas about greenland
for a moderate amount of time

thought to myself while smiling with teeth:
sometimes when I’m smiling with teeth I can feel that I am making
the former face of my mother
I can feel that I am looking the way she used to look
when she was happy and lapping up flower paintings from a jar of turpentine
and not when she sat backwards on the kitchen chair,
facing the sliding door and crying into the reflection of herself crying
because frank sinatra had died

they played frank sinatra at work today
and I stopped briefly to remember his voice
but it was less like consenting to remembrance and more like
“here, feel this old thing via some noise coming softly from the ceiling,
via your brain recognizing the noise and rearranging its army of whatever
to forcefully yield a feeling of a thing that you want, a feeling that you want,
an understanding that you want and miss”
in my apron and behind my nametag, the voice of frank sinatra
found me in the kitchen of my childhood

I used to dance in small tap shoes and feel extremely immortal
I used to sleepwalk through rumors of things ceasing to exist
I used to love like an insane person and I used to sleepwalk
through rumors of things ceasing to exist

my biggest fear is that I have spent my entire life
solving for the death of the only thing that lives forever: inertia
my biggest fear is that the disease has won
my biggest fear is that the disease has shaped my thoughts
that it has killed me before it has killed me even more
and in a way that permanently alienates me and prevents me
from every kind of love that enables happiness
my biggest fear is that I can’t change this even if I am aware of it
my biggest fear is that I have nothing else to talk about
my biggest fear is that I’m silent because I’m boring
my biggest fear is that boringness is innate
my biggest fear is that I’m right



at work there is a woman who reads the lifelines on peoples' palms
and i hid my palms from her last week
i put my palms in my apron and i wanted to burn my palms
i put my palms in my apron and i wanted to lose all evidence
of lines that speak about my life in fictitious ways that frighten me

my biggest annoyance is that I will never emotionally understand all of the things
I understand intellectually, that this inability will prevent me from being happy

and when the weight of this possibility dawns on me, it doesn’t even ‘dawn’

it does something even bigger to me
I swear it does the biggest thing to me

intellectually i can redefine the problem as my attempts to solve
for things that don’t exist
emotionally I still insist that my happiness demands that the sky
be less like a thing that mocks me, and more like a blanket,
less like a strange weapon and more like a gallery of weird birds
wearing the same wings for years at a time and existing to demonstrate beauty
at mysterious altitudes

I feel unhappy when the sky resorts to being too large,
like a thing I understand less the more I see it
and so I am often busy 
writhing in an endless riddle
subconsciously subscribing to a positive correlation between internal Writhing
and Getting Somewhere
paranoid for meaning and eager to believe that happiness is not Old,
eager to experience things without judging both Them,
the things, and my perception of them

eager to feel love
eager to love
eager to not leave when I become terrified that I am boring
eager to not think of myself as boring
eager to not be boring
eager to just hold you
eager to kiss you
eager to kiss you
eager to hold you
smiling
with teeth