I HAVE A DREAM

Update.

I’ve written eleven thousand four hundred and twenty-one words of a new book. Of course, because of that progress—because of that Icarian flight too close to the brilliant, blinding sun—I’ve crashed. The wax has melted and dripped to ruin—I can feel it now, hardening on my skin, leaving me like a dining table after a candlelit dinner party. At least a table serves a purpose.

I am empty. The monkey in my brain returns to banging its cymbals—this is the nothingness. Occasionally, it pauses to fling excrement at the walls of my skull—this is the punishment. Both are self-inflicted.

When I had a job, I had nothingness and punishment, too, but I filled the nothingness with dinner and sex and drinks and sweet treats, and television. You can do this when you have a job because it takes so much from you—the job is the punishment, and indulgence is only fair. A job is just three cardboard letters cut out with an exacto knife and propped up by your bedside—the first thing you see when the alarm goes off. No one knows what you do all day, and you don’t know what you do all day, but you fill the nothingness with dinner and sex and drinks and sweet treats and television all the same.

Now, I have a passion—a dream. That’s a whole other animal—full of breath and blood. It feeds on my sleep and drinks the daylight, and I hope it will live well and be healthy because of this. Instead, it hunches on all fours, retching and gagging until it makes sick inside my soul. I can’t even be angry—I have to be grateful it’s still alive. I have to clean up all that mess from the carpet, and thank God it’s still alive because I love it so. It makes a mess and eats away at me, but I thank God because I love it so.

Of course, after everything is clean, I still have the nothingness. I still have a cavern so vast that only my dream can fill it, but right now, it’s too sick and tired and lazy and sleeping. So, I pass the time with punishment. I pass the time kicking myself square in the chest and wringing my own neck. I pass the time flaying myself and holding my head underwater.

I cut and strike and gouge, and I wait for my dream to wake. I wait, and I wait, and I wait, and I wait and I thank God it’s still alive because I love it so.

The Nightmare - Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)