the tea kettle. pt 1.
There’s a black tea kettle that decorates a shelf full of books and notebooks that haven’t fully been written in. Norman Rockwell prints oddly fill the wall below the shelf, and there are Hermes Paris adverts that seemingly inspire brilliance. And for no specific reason there hangs a poster that says, En Route to the Holidays! A man dances on the page and a woman sings outside the window, or at least that’s what I picture my dreams holding.
Outside the door rests a chair that was 100 years olds, crafted by whoever lived back then. It’s painted black and etched upon the back of the chair reads the name Elias Screw, and below that in crayon reads Magic Potion most likely written by a child from a decade ago.
Do my dreams hold value in my life now? They do, I think. Thoughtfully partaking in drinking the drugs they bring to my doorstep is an exercise in futility, and yet I love that sporadic nature of understanding the voracity of life they provide to my soul. An element of creating death and life by pushing through a world of unreality into an unreal reality.
“Newspapers are Dead! Get Your New Device Now!”
“Print is no longer available, please provide documentation to receive your FREE and FULL TAXPAYER FUNDED envelope device of everything you could possibly need!”
“FORTUNE AVAILABLE, just drop off your books to be turned into digital copies and pursue enlightenment in the NEW world.”
Dreams seemingly purport to envelope something odd and real.
I saw her there last night too. And the night before, we talked. Very real I must add. I’d only wonder if she spoke to me as well. And if she did, why are we no longer speaking, or writing, letters to her. I do in my dreams I think. They read so softly and full of something I’m searching for a bit.
Something like this.
I wish we would have danced a bit more, just so I could whisper once more how I love you. And even as the distance between then and the time filled with us diverges even more, I still envy the dreams I have of us from before. They have passed on as have my feelings I think, and yours most definitely, but perhaps the part of my soul that still sees the past and knows what the future would have held aches for a moment. Because the dancing to the stars music as shrooms decorate the space around our eyes and the road becomes a rainbow of infinite dramatic proportions to spell unlimited exterior and philosophical genius to begin to write an epic. An epic like the Iliad, or a poem decorated in Shakespeare's voice, yet written by our souls in that moment. My envy is overwhelming at times, sparking a decision of what it means to move through life without you. Without a soul that fits into my dreams. And as I move through this life without you, as the roads become fashioned to hold nothing but my past and the new future I am attempting to write without you, I know that perhaps my soul is crafted into something new. Something beyond you, and in that I know yours is as well. So just as they once fit together, I know a tie will still be pulling us along together, pushing into something great I believe.
And the letters in the dreams move along, as if the dreams are begging me to write them in reality. Dropping to my knees the aches begin to draw on and on and on driving deeper into a hallucination of nothingness. Of nothingness. The stars spackled across the night sky remind me of that. As in the nothingness and the distant paintings that line the night sky, there is a pain of what could have been that still holds weight. And in the infinite opportunities of what could have been, there lies something sincerely firm in our tie. In the begging that my dreams draw me to, a perplexing notion of what I do not dare to write fills the void.
I wrote a story the other night of a family distracted by the stars they forgot to eat dinner. It’s a simple story of the dangers our imaginations can create for us, and yet. Isn’t there something beautiful in that danger? At least there is to me.
Neon signs line the road I float along now as my car was turned into an autopilot demo-mobile that scares me quite a lot. The backseat of the car is littered with newspaper clippings I’ve collected, all pointing to the degradation of the world I once knew. Beside me sits a cup with old turmeric beer(non-alcoholic) and a notebook I’ve stretched thin between notes and poems and flowers I’ve tried to preserve through a new spray process that allows the flower to stick to the paper without finding itself in a world of mold and lacking the fondness we desire from such a thing.
Beyond the roads I float along begins to show a world of schools and buildings with no humans working yet wholly accomplished. It’s odd. To see a world we have dominated begins to hold the very thing we think will destroy us. And yet I think we have already destroyed ourselves for a moment. Rather than pushing for the extent of our own capabilities, we have pushed every other aspect of reality. From the very things we create have borne things fully and easily capable of crafting a world much more complex than what we first brought forth. Rather than crafting that world ourselves, our delegation will invoke our destruction. Perhaps at least in my estimation it will.
The school I grew up in has become a game haven of sorts. Virtual reality and the dreamverse(seemingly a different thing than the occurrences I fall into) sit in the old classrooms I learned mathematics and english within.
I crossed a bridge on my way home, and fell deeply into something much further away from the bridge itself. I found myself sitting there, seeing her. Finding myself upon a chair in a room specked and dusted with lights and words. My chair was as imbalanced as I was at that moment. The golden hue of the lightbulbs brought forth a glow of radiant desire and purity alongside her and I was stuck. Then I awoke and a knock on the window lit up my face. The dog I had grown up with and somehow figured out how to live for a bit longer than his lifespan was jumping up and down scratching the side of my car. I guess it had been a few weeks since I had been in town - the dreams had taken myself a bit further away from where I call home, and that is the scary thing about the world I had now found myself in.
The people who ask or tell me to drop my books off and turn them into something less than a book are the same people who seemingly drive the world into insanity. I’m not being hyperbolic in that statement either. It seems that there is something almost incredibly idyllic in their belief of what they are doing, crafting a world without written story in order to build a world where story holds no power over anyone, except the ones they deem fit. It’s oddly reminiscent of the books I read, funny how that happens isn’t it? That the stories we are told as children begin to come true. If only giants and friendly ogres would find their way to my door to play sometime.
Dusty canvases my friends painted on years ago are the only thing left in a loft I had held onto for a few years. They hold stories once more. Of us sitting around drinking tea I had steeped for far too long while music on a bluetooth speaker eroded into our ears just as the tea slowly seeped its way into our souls for a moment, warming our bodies just as our presence oftentime would warm our souls. I found that time to be extremely worthwhile to all of us. There were six.
We called it the Clubhouse, and one of us started thinking up a magazine of sorts, biannually published for a total of 3 years with a complex making of poetry, artistry that befit Vogue and Life Magazine with photography of our dreams coming true. It was called The Clubhouse’ Lowly Dreams, and in those lowly dreams we found ourselves creating something quite wonderful. Our poetry read along as simple and yet fully unpacking why it was that most poetry of our era had become so arrogant and only viewing the world around us as reality, without peeling back the veils we put up for ourselves. The photography was stark, often unsettling as it was real. Real in the sense that it showed our humanity, often moments of weakness, of fear, and of pain. The artistry was prints of our canvases. The canvases of which held color and power. There was reality and yet we couldn’t discern what exactly it was. I can’t find the words for it right now. Scarily, those years became the most fulfilling. Until it crashed down.
