My shirt smells faintly like basement. Musty, muggy. Green swamp. Plant parts. Washed in earth. My dreams have been chopped meat. Meaty dreams. Choppy dreams. Images and nothing else. But the last two nights I’ve woken in the morning and felt full. Stuffed. Over-packed luggage. P laughed in his sleep two nights ago and I’d never seen him do that before. This morning I thought he did it again, but he wasn’t sure. Half dreams. We add our own reality. My dreams are bodies – thick and fleshy and it annoys me that I can’t remember much of what they’re telling me. We had to walk through Compton to get home. My group clashing with the locals. My group joking around and throwing gang signs because they thought they were cool. And me thinking there’s nothing glamorous about this. lay low. Get home. You’re going to throw the wrong sign, wear the wrong color. You’re going to get killed for not giving a shit about your surroundings.
No one from our group died, but we did see two men get in a gun fight. At close range. Both screaming things I couldn’t understand. The one man turning two guns on himself and shot ten times into his stomach, maybe more. They both died.
Whatever that is, I’m not sure why these dreams are making me full. It’s a richness. I must not be sleeping well – this morning, I turned off my alarm, stayed in bed, writing could wait – the way P grazed my breast with half his fingers, loose and soft like a security blanket. I stayed in bed.
I’ve worn my pink boots in the rain before. Wet spots, stains soaking all the moisture. The soft button of bruised fruit. The imperfections. But they’d dry and I’d think all is well, I didn’t fuck them up too bad. In all this humidity, those spots vanish and come back, vanish and come back. Used bruises. Even boots have ghosts from their past.
Leave a Reply