6:06 a.m. - 2001-12-27
Real
It is a frosty night in Virginia, the kind where vocal chords seem restricted by the very prospect of breathing. And so I settle in my familiar oak chair, leaning back on the stolen couch pillow placed there for support during my marathon paper writing days, and find that place where my voice encounters no constraints.
Dead Can Dance (through my eardrums), whips and congas pulling out a precise beat. The yellowing keyboard leans slightly to the left, and a soft, lilting light filters from the wrought iron flower lamp that my mother purchased during a sale at Lowes. This is what I know. It is the beginning and the end of every day.
Smoke filters up and Sarah Vaughn�s voice swells with husky intensity; I am almost through with my auotopilot e-mail perusal. And my eyes focus in on a telltale sentence.
And the dream/nightmare is over.
When I read that last line, it resonated with me. You see, I know how the author feels. Or perhaps I am just layering my thoughts over this benign, objective conglomeration of words nestled neatly in the corner of my monitor.
Taken out of context, this sentence evokes nothing except mild confusion. But then again, not many people have lived in a house that actively watches your every move. They don�t understand how the priority of privacy can be so easily rearranged, as long as it never finds a way to embody an overly righteous Jacob Marley. The vast majority of folks have never had a hulking cameraman, complete with boom-mike sidekick, track their nearly naked progress down a hallway illuminated with glistening votive candles. They wouldn�t know how you have to ignore the shadowplay on the walls next to you. If you do happen to glance over, you might just see that the well-meaning camera crew and their equipment suddenly loom starkly, like a grotesque, hunched palmetto bug moving awkwardly through the flickering enclosure. But please understand. There is no fear. Only love. So I didn�t even falter, or slow my gait. I floated towards the dream.
And now it is over.
As a writer, everything I fashion for escape into the printed word is resonant. Every placement of an article, every pronoun, every adjective: they are shards of myself, chipped from the whole. Late at night, I will sit cross-legged and smoking, and study the configurations of the words I have produced. This webpage has been a solitary place for my reminiscing, an instant fix for my soapbox junkie, a path to freeze frame shots of moments I attempt to salvage past their expiration date. Lamination, if you will.
There is a shameful twinge of relief apparent when I think of how the past bled into the present, and perhaps this is why I have not written of those times since I was last embroiled within them. It has to resonate. It has to be real. It has to be the dream and the nightmare, or there are no words aching (or deserving) to be written.
Only memories too fresh and sticky to begin the process of preserving.
