So, the first part is something I wrote some time ago and decided now try to and expand on it quite a bit. I have a basic concept for it, but no real plot fleshed out which worries me. It's been quite a long time since I've had a formal English class and I've never had a writing class so I'm sure some of the punctuation and formatting is a nightmare. I'm more looking for feedback on the theme, and how it reads. Thank you. I'm new to the sub and look forward to reading as well.
Part 1 (written some time ago and recently edited)
All the things I hid from in sleep are beckoning my consciousness for a cold, first breath. Like compressed air (constantly circulating molecules climbing over each other, looking for a way out like their own personal earth began to quake from the left, with safety to the right), that breath will barrel out of my lungs baring the burdens I bred through the handful of nightmares I had but can’t remember. It’s the ones I can’t remember that scare me the most because I always wake up sweaty, with an unnatural aversion to some everyday object or feeling that had stalked me the night before. You sit there, paranoid, trying to trace a makeshift timeline of a bad dream that got taken away in the process of waking up still intact. You sit there, paranoid, and somehow try to consider the life you have to lead that day. Feed the kids, go to work, please your boss, get stuck in traffic, hopefully fuck your wife, and lay down for another bout with the ebb and flow of sleep, knowing that the depth at which you drown in dream is entirely different than above the surface, in the real world. Down here you just sink and sink until you hear the wolves knocking at your door, and all the things you hid from in sleep are suddenly asking for that cold, first breath. They shout and cackle for you to breathe, just breathe and wake up.
Breathe and wake up.
Wake up.
I feel myself scream, and then there it is. There’s that sickening sound when I wake up, before I even open my eyes. I can feel the glare, too, beating at the side of my face, analyzing the stubble I’ve grown because I haven’t shaved in three days. That sickening sound bounces off my practically paper-thin walls in that peculiar way that leaves you unsure of how near the source is.
And I sit there, paranoid, contemplating the things I have to do today, and how I don't really remember my life flashing before my eyes last night.
“I think I should go,” she says.
It’s not the first time I've heard the sound when I wake up, and it seems to happen more frequently. She rolls out from underneath the covers, her bare skin glistening in what little light cascades through the one window I have since they built that building right next to mine. She slips on a pair of jeans and a shirt, and gathers the rest of her things before I even have the chance to tell her I think it’s a good idea.
I lay there for just another minute or hour, and slowly but surely rest my feet on the cracked hardwood. It’s really cold in here, and if it wasn't May I’d be beating down my roommates door to call the gas company and beg them to turn the heat back on, since we’ll have the money on Monday - Tuesday at the latest. I guess it’s just me.
I look like shit, but I keep looking into the mirror, just past my grizzled, pale reflection. Without breaking my gaze I turn the water on, and slowly muster up the courage to look away and douse my face in the cool stream. I guess the saddest part is that I don’t feel at all out of the ordinary. There’s a certain point where you stop being aware that you’re sliding downhill.
I slip on the pants I wore to the bar last night, because it seemed a whole lot easier, and today is a day off. The last 142 days have been a day off, actually. A steady rotation of psychiatrists, behavior analysts, psychotherapists, and countless other designations of Certified Mental Health Professional have sunk more man hours than I’m sure they wish they had on a guy like me, and my government mandated, discounted healthcare frowns upon their lack of a diagnosis so the disability is going to lapse. I’ve lined up a job with my roommate, working the overnight shift in the bargain-bin warehouse store he’s been slaving in for most of his adult life. It’s a terrible life he leads, but it’s about to be my terrible life, too. After all, I start tomorrow.
I close my door behind me as I glide into the common room of our run-down, two-bedroom personal hell and walk with a certain absence of purpose to the refrigerator. “Broken,” reads the message, eloquent in it’s brevity, scrawled onto the payment envelope of last month’s rent, affixed to the fridge with a magnet from the tourism bureau of Los Angeles. I’ve never been there, and I’m not sure where I got the magnet. I open the fridge with a misguided hope that the milk hadn’t soured yet. I pop the top off and my nose, which is still stuffy from the cold I came down with three weeks ago, is met with the pungent smell of disappointment. It looks like Fruit Loops and water is what’s for breakfast.
Despite an excruciating lack of enthusiasm for the meal I’m about to consume, I grab the last clean spoon and head to the couch to stare at the spot on the wall that’s a little cleaner than the rest, since we don’t have a TV anymore.
Chapter 2 (written tonight to expand)
It may have just been instinct but I catch myself actually drinking the water out of the bowl, head tipped back like it would be those times I used to see if staring at the sun would actually make me go blind. It turns out I didn't have the stomach to finish what I started back then, and I really can't stomach the thought of finishing this now.
I throw the bowl in the conspicuously empty sink. I can't tell if my roommate started pitying me and now cleans up after me, or if I really just haven't eaten in the long. I constantly lose weight. It's allegedly part of an adjustment disorder. The adjustment disorder was the first diagnosis I ever got slapped on me and it always felt like a throwaway but now it seems like I can use it to explain myself out of anything stupid, shitty thing I do. I don't think I've hurt anyone but me, at least not in a sense other than my mother, along with everyone else whoever even thought they might have loved me, is mortified by what's happened to me. At night, I'll feel myself in the conversations they have. It's not even your typical, “he had so much promise,” style conversations and more of a, “how in god's name doesn't any human being allow themselves to slide so far and not seem like they have even noticed,” kind of conversation.
I have noticed. It's just becoming hard to distinguish the two and I'm not exactly sleeping a set schedule and sometimes I wake up at 10 in the morning, and sometimes I wake up at 1 in the morning, and I'm never really sure if I'm supposed to be up, why I'm supposed to be up or if I'm really up. It's very confusing and it leads to a lot of unaccounted for time and actions.
“Clark, let's stop taking about dreams.”
See, those words stumble out of another fucking psychologist's mouth and all of a sudden I have no idea what I did since breakfast or if I actually ate it. I'm not wearing the pants I thought I wore to the bar last night so I must have changed but what I find particularly grating is the way he said it. I'm here because of the dreams.
“But, Dr...” I pause and squint to see the nameplate on his desk but can't really make it out. Before I can really decide what to call him he interrupts me.
“What does it feel like to be you?”
“Motherfucker,” I think, probably out loud given the expression on Dr. Nameplate's face.
“I don't know,” I say.
“You don't know?”
“Motherfucker.”
I don't say it this time out loud, but I definitely rolled my eyes hard enough for him to feel a breeze. I do that thing where your hands run quickly from your upper thighs to your knees as if to dust them off even though there wasn't anything on them, give them a hearty slap and stand up. He seems taken back, like he doesn't trust what I'm about to do. That actually hurt me, which is one of the more honest thoughts I've had since I started telling you all this, but I knew that I had to leave because I couldn't have this same conversation again. Truth is, I have no idea who I am. Not in some sort of wayward soul way. Not in some sort of I'm meant to live as a nomad because the structures of society truly cannot begin to contain me, but in a way in which I mean that I never, ever know who I am. Every time I wake up my life seems different. There's repeating themes and motifs, but the surreality of it all is nothing is ever really the same. The only constant is that I breathe and wake up, and I'm even starting to question what is really happening when that moment comes around.
Submitted February 24, 2015 at 06:23AM by dickgilbert http://ift.tt/1EKjlbm WritersGroup
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