-In the darkness, he fumbles with his thoughts. Always, the wonderment. Much has been misplaced in his life and it’s in the dark, as the cigarette crackles, that he begins to think. “The mice eating away at the house,” a great poet once said. And he sits there, in the darkness, the realm of shadows and unseen manifestations.
When the light is on, he sees shapes in the shadows of day. He sees people and names. Now, it’s all recollection, everything reconfigured, everything redrafted by the mechanism of memory. An impossible hallucination of what his life has been, that only resembles his life’s true trajectory. It is the dream of the beautiful pain, every happiness, pristine and idealized, every tragedy, bludgeoned into the heart.
So he closes his eyes in the darkness and and here, in the darkness, with his eyes closed, lies, inherently, intrinsically, possibility. It is this same possibility he searches for as he trudges tiredly under the sun, in his waking life. But here, all possibility manifests as it was in thought and dream, pristinely perfect.
His eyes flash open and he recalls the many conversations entertained with friends and acquaintances. The conclusion: perfection is a pain unto its own. But they’ve misperceived it. Perfection is not flawless, simply, what creates individual happiness. It is ephemeral.
His eyes tremble down, from darkness to darkness. Here, he knows, perfection lasts as long as he can will sleep and absence. And in his new darkness, a moon shines, the symbol of the magic of nights in which he walked in the dim light, with a woman he loved but never knew. Here, he sees her clearly as if she had never left and their moment had never broken. He feels the warmth of her as their hands melt together, here, they will never separate.
The alarm clock blares and his eyes pulse open, red like when he’s been awake for days and consciousness is painful. He’s stopped having this dream everynight, there’s something about it that’s draining, she never leaves, she’ll never leave, but it’s as if something is not happy with her staying and he always wakes with red pained eyes. But he’ll never close off this dream completely, it’s his favorite, it’s almost flawlessly perfect.
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