symphonies of waking
��������� �����a leatherlike quality to the hours that passed, thick and nearly unrecognisable. there were not many of them, and most of which were sustained by me staring at the blue-white glow of the monitor (oh god, i wrote 'minotaur') and trying to write another scene for "End of the World, Missouri" the one-act play that i'm doing for class.last night i was awake until seven, eight o'clock, nearly nine, and the hours began to bleed, like my left eye, which was slowly more and more bloodshot. peeling back the skin and peering at it in the mirror, the pupil and iris wobbling back and forth unsteadily like a trapped fish in a small aquarium. small red veins crack the inverted ceiling of my cornea, as though my pupil was the black hole of my being and was slowly sucking the blood from my heart...
i collapsed, at length, into the relative comfort of jason's chair, the feeling of which was instantaneously received. i passed out. later, the alarm went off, and jason got up to do semi-sonnambulant duties in the bathroom. i got up and half-keeled over onto his bed. the next conscious thing i remember is the red digits of his clock swimming into focus and the glow of his computer. it's 430pm, i've missed all of my classes, and i'm about to sleep again. the next time i remember is 1030pm, and i so i get up and face ... the day.
which is why this is now 6am. i have seen three variations on the symphonic sunsets of the past week, a dusky red colour like a bruised blush, a sickly gray-white accompanied with snow and lightning, and a cloudy non-sun rising. this morning is a kickback to days in upton-hastings when i would look out at portland and see the fantastic array of the lower rainbow. i caught myself thinking tonight, too, about what would happen if an asteroid were to hit the atlantic ocean ...
a deck of cards and a half-empty bottle of mountain dew on the desk before me. i somehow wish it was a bottle of beer, or something. it fits cards better. the open book of the drama lit anthology, open to the third page of "everyman" and plato's "symposium" atop that, closed in disgust. waiting for the daft initials of the computer's clock to tick toward 8am, so i can get up and go to the bus for classes.
janitors rummaging out in the hallway. i used to want to be one. garbagemen in the morning, trucking silently around gorham. newspaper boys. it's the opposite of the end of "our town" ... good morning, good morning, good morning ...
like a bell in the town square. nothing's very cheerful, but all is very steady and calm. a crest of wakefulness.
and the trough of the wave is when we sleep. turbid depths and dark dreams of fish swimming by.