It’s a struggle just to keep my eyes open. Heavy with sleep and the burden of unconscious waking, they threaten to let me down just like everything else. Just like the papery rosebuds tossed to the bottom of that little terracotta pot that moved over decades, from the little room at the top of the house in the middle of the street in a place that’s vanished from my memory like invisible ink, to its present residence, untouched by me now as it will always be. Just like the black ink staining the soles of my feet on a night that springs up a long-forgotten name attached to the disappearing features of a face I once slapped inside a red car with black leather seats and the stench of a dead heart. I turn the dial up and play the song you sent me over and over until it turns into white noise. I zone out into an electric blue field where nothing exists except all the words I haven’t written yet. It’s comforting to know that they’re all there and mine for the taking, even if the taking takes too long. I go back to the day I first noticed the clouds, lying back on that springy sofa inside that room in a home along the tracks, looking out backwards past the red-tiled floors, up into the clear blue sky. Where did we come from and why are we here? When did it all begin and why and how? Why do we leave our homes in the morning and return to the same place at night? Why don’t we walk out of one door and step into an entirely new one in another place filled with different people? Why must we come back to the same old slippers, same old refrigerators and same old eyes glazed with the same old stain of indifference? When you’re 7, you have no answers to these questions. At 41, you have the answers, only they are so insipid that you’d rather go back to the same old questions. I climb into bed and try sinking into my sweet spot when I realize that I have none, and I never did. Just like I have no comfort zone when it comes to everything and everyone else. I’ve held the hands of those who swore to drench me with unending sweetness and I’ve looked back at them with disbelief, a disbelief that was misinterpreted for acknowledgement. The truth is that I believed it too… the promises of sweetness and my reciprocity. When you walk down unfamiliar alleys along unknown streets in alien towns, anything and everything can seem mysterious and exotic, from a fading blue door to the string of flowers wilting in the sun. You wonder what’s behind the door and why it stands where it does. Who strung those flowers together and who bought them to adorn the abundant tresses of whose head? And who decided it was time to toss them out into the street, just below the window of a man who no longer remembers what it feels like to walk unaided. I shut my eyes and flip through the channels of my day – that one delicious moment savoured, all those fleeting moments missed, that hour spent alternating between the seconds in which only you and I exist and the others with us repeatedly moving the knife in and out just to see if we bleed, and if we do, will the colour of that blood match the shade of dust around our graves, and then all the other hours I indulged in a wound that doesn’t exist, an entire evening chasing the full moon above a patch of earth strewn with garbage and the muffled sighs of those who’ve sewn their eyes shut. And now, it’s time to dream.