Strain of Consciousness

There are a limited few who’ve left the hold of gravity, who’ve been jettisoned into the great abyss of space, and lived a separate lifetime away from the friction and resistance that complicates everything on the surface of terrestrial bodies. They’ve experienced a different existence. It is hard upon their return, to leave that behind. Often, there is a dizziness and a vertigo that makes it seem as if the planes of their existence are overlapping and the disorientation makes it difficult for them to situate themselves where they are. They cling to the familiar in the echoes of the […]

There, in the dark, they talk. They are like the ocean and the seashell, their whispers filling the space of the room, catching the scant refractions of lost light. In their whisperings they agree and disagree, having lived two completely separate lives to this point, their perspectives are just a hair from parallel. She can see what he sees and yet cannot see it quite the same. Yet there is something in the narrative, there, in the dark, after the projection of it, that pulls them both but not quite the way they are pulled toward each other. [The gravity; […]

They sit. Both of them. Together.  They sit on the couch, caught in the television glow, as the score quickens its pace and swells. There’s that sense that they should have always existed within the same boundaries of space and along the same timeline making its winding trajectory through myriad possibilities. They haven’t. They sit here now. [This moment]. The moment fills with the odd sensation, or rather it is his heart, which is what makes it seem as if it is the moment, that he’s always known her, that on some level they have always been connected the way […]

Falling back into the space which still holds his form, onto the pillow which still hasn’t forgotten the curvature of his head. He breathes in deeply and closes his eyes a little longer. Life continues beyond moments and beyond dreams. If only we could construct brackets around the best of these and exist there within them without care for what came before or what follows [here is what stands out most and what you’ll remember]. There is no way he could return to sleep in the brief time he has left, but he imagines that he could and attempts to […]

The sunlight floods through the rear window, the brown tinged liquid inside the little plastic cylinder becomes washed out. The hand holding the syringe becomes a bleached out silhouette. There’s a sudden infusion, crimson. It dances with the rust colored liquid, swirling around and reaching to the top of the barrel, toward the plunger. Then it all vanishes into a vein. The belt hangs off the arm, like in the movies. The car sits on Figueroa under the overpass north of Temple. This is Los Angeles. Downtown. This is the Los Angeles of my adolescence. The Los Angeles that no […]

In the moon’s desaturated hues, the fall breeze frustratedly blows at the blinds causing them to tremble, and they lay there, their bodies intertwined, her head resting on his arm resting on the worn pillow. Her knee pressing against his inner thigh, as his leg gently presses and half pulls her closer to him. The comforter below them strewn and bunched up at its different ends. The thin blanket they’ve tossed upon themselves, barely covering anything, a kind of afterthought at the late hour. The moon’s light refracts off the pale walls filling the moments with an ethereal atmosphere. In […]