Time dreamed, and I was there.

The persistently nagging sense of simultaneously being there and not being there. A fusion and mediation of allegedly separate entities, such as timelines, distances (intimacy, you see, belong to the immeasurable). The mantling of persona built from weeds and alibis, desires and habits, the masks we cycle through, then discard, disavow.

Children. Or myth. The child’s fresh-gladed perspective, the child, vision-swarming, fragile, vulnerable, tender flesh-toned antennas receiving transmissions in a cruel and unblinkingly merciless universe, a child lost in the hum-wattage of wonder, caught in the wheels or terror and awe, the rubbery wheels, a squeaking, shrieking, the wheels pitching moist soprano on the cold tiled floor, the floors long forgotten recalled in her voice, here there be voices, voices crashing and splashing everywhere, faraway and near both, a buzzsaw roar of voices, one of them small and squeaky, this one hers, hers alone: I am scared, I am seventeen, this skinny scared-girl thing, they wheel me into the emergency room, my stomach on fire, no, not on fire, like I’ve swallowed a spiked ball, no, not that either, there are no words for it…

It bothers me that she has no words for it—even though I am the one speaking through her silence, I—no words for it—there must be words—always I have sought, primarily in vain, sequential blocks and patterns and reciprocal arrangements of words to heal whatever was in need of healing, to feel, to escape, to transgress, to enable balm in Gilead (where is Gilead? and why does it require balm?)—the list goes on and on—a list dependent upon words—I have always depended upon the company and kindness of words—yet beyond the still-squeaking wheels her voice won’t leave me alone—there are no words for it (when she says this I remind myself that silence will have the last say, the truest say, I say this to myself yet stubbornly oppose it on principle alone, going on groping for words in the dark—kindness, company, balm in Gilead), but back to her voice sliding with the rest of her under hot glaring lamps, about to have a suicide, about to give birth, the life-giving, the suicide in question, questions in a world of blue, all of it blurs together in a frantic mesh, and I, I am the flash-popped result, the goo-slathered bulb. A story from out of the dark. One of many. They go on and on.

I have done my best to intimately acquaint myself with the dark, even went so far as classifying dark in its many nodes and phases (more on this later), and there is, I imagine, I must imagine, there is a self lurking beneath persona, a nameless swimmer wary of the bends and tagged for void, self that can never, ever be written or spoken about so I do my damndest to write and speak about it every chance I get, a voice touching absence on its phantom limb, a feathery delicate brushing against, expecting in return a warmly felt response, or even the slightest peck of tenderness.