my dreams as of late have been violent and sad, like a neverending forgotten war with mothers waiting at the doors for faceless soldiers that never will come home anymore. Waking up to an alarm clock that reads a time that i don't want to see, walking around on old hardwood floors, creaks and noises and shadows that look like things i am not supposed to see. and in my dreams i'm struck by lightning, loud booms and white hot supernovas, or ghosts whispering in my ear near my parents old shed in an old house that i don't live in anymore. and i wake up in cold sweats with an empty bed.
i had a nice thought the other day, which was a nice change from my normal thought process. i was sitting outside of a coffee shop i do not frequent and i saw cars and trucks and banks and stores and strip malls all around me, trying to figure out which animal the cloud rolling by overhead looked like. and i couldn't. i wish i could unbuild all the buildings in the nicest of ways and then maybe when we look at clouds we can see animals again. strip ourselves of our faith in modern steel, go back a bit further, a bit farther to something that we only recall in deep sleep.
and on the same day i asked myself how many butterflies have i seen fly by my window, yellow wings flapping against the wind as yellow caution lines streak by? how many days have i flown by, times i've looked in a mirror, had flippant conversations with people i don't keep in touch with anymore? lots of questions, few answers. such is life. maybe the mystery to this place is there is no mystery. or maybe there is. maybe infinity and eternity are supposed to be mind boggling and frustrating things to think of, to wrap your head around. i often try to sit around and think about what an eternity could be like. take my best day ever, or even the best day i've had lately and then multiply times forever. but that equation won't work, can't work because there is still the issue of time and space and place, and i know that won't compute in the world of infinities and eternities. void of time, outside of space, a place that does not include or need those things. so then my idea of eternity is automatically null and void.
and the dreams continue and my bed just stays empty, and the buildings remain built and upright and clouds pass by overhead not as turtles or anything childlike, just clouds of gas. and butterflies are just streaks on my windshield that i can't see through. but their pattern remains the same, and what i knew of them remains on that windshield like a fingerprint of their lives, of all i've ever known contained in some small splatter. and that is all that i will know of them or can. maybe life and eternity and everything is just like that. a small fingerprint on a piece of glass. and as much as we can fathom and understand is left for us. and there all these things that make up a man, but all we can understand is his fingerprint.
so i'll place my hand on a piece of nearby glass and hope that you want to know more.
