Arkansas
A dream is as volatile as it is revelatory, and we don’t mean in just our aspirations. To wake up one morning, where the ocean’s gentle turns sound through your window and the sun rays sneak through your blinds, and remember that which you saw in your sleep: a lost memory, an escaped love, a reminder of who you once were and how far a distance you have walked since then. Time becomes nothing in that theater, and upon waking our lives feel changed. We wish to follow that feeling that we found in the dark of night as it walks in the day, in sync with our senses and even collaborating with our decision-making. We dream, and everything changes.
There was once a lyric that spoke of the hills of Arkansas, of the early evening streets and the neighborhoods where all the houses had turned on their lights in approach of the dark. In those amber glows a feeling returned—it was I who had written that lyric—and a dream emerged, or perhaps just an aberration of a dream, or a memory, and I thought to myself: “I’ve lived far too many different lives, and this is most certainly not the first time, but maybe this one is finally mine.”
Leaves
She was turning over the leaf in her hand as if it were a page in a book she couldn’t understand. Plucked from the grass beneath the oak tree, the one down the cul-de-sac from where we’d grown up, in the vast field that often let fly the intimidating imagination of adolescence, we had sat down in its shade on that summer afternoon. Her brown hair was let down, as she had the novel talent of losing every single hair tie given to her. I could see the loose shreds of grass and specks of leaves trap themselves in her weave.
The wind blew one moment. An impulse came over her—her eyes always shot wide open like a memory had returned—and she let fly the leaf through the currents of the air.
The Trains Beneath Innsbrook
Somewhere in the depths of the town of Innsbrook laid the remains of a train station. This was a story more popular to the ears of outsiders than any of the denizens who, it was likely, wished not to think about what unknown wreckage expanded beneath their very feet, and so for most it was neither-here-nor-there and not-something-to-discuss, at least not while you were in Innsbrook. The moment you stepped out all rumors were fair game, and that is how the story came to spread in the first place.
Louis had heard the story from an insurance agent en route to a southern port town, who had heard it from a weeping bartender struggling with keeping her family together, and she had heard it from a smooth-talking conman who was traveling from town to town. Once the leftovers of the tale had reached his ears, Louis decided that above all else he wanted to hear the story from its source, so he went after the conman.
Lunar Horses
We set out across the prairie well before dawn broke. Our dreams often lied in the bigger picture and we knew all too well how impatient we’d get while waiting for it all to come into frame, so we talked about what it meant to take it “mile by mile.” So Mackenzie suggested we leave early, at a time where the world was shared custody between sun and moon and the birds slept well yet. It would be quiet and serene, like a world that nobody had stepped foot on yet—a moon here on Earth.
Mackenzie’s steed was a confident fellow most of the time, arrogant only some, and it was on departure that he was far more the latter than anything else. She took the lead while Buck and me followed. To our right we saw the early rays of morning; To our left, an expanse of darkness to be left behind. Ahead of us lay the fields, and across them were the mountains.
On Writing
It’s the bane of my existence, truly. For what seems like hours my fingers will toil with what feels like a putrid dance through a swampy environ, and by the time they come to a rest I’ll have looked upon the treasure of their trek and see bits of gold strewn amongst layers of filth. With that unsatisfactory result my attention will go elsewhere, and start over in another bog with another goal to satisfy an inner something.
When I shared this observation with Randall, he was an absolute mess of chicken wing sauce and bits of the low quality napkin stuck to his beard. He set down his bone and said, “It’s always gonna sound like shit when you first try, but it’s gotta get done somehow. When we were making our iPhone game it didn’t actually feel like a game until the last three months.”
“But I can’t enjoy it if it’s not good.”
“You can’t tell if it’s good when you’re talking like that, man.”
New Heart
The heart implodes, expanding into all its fractal shapes and histories, it beats for a moment once more until our reality arrives. Her eyes make a hesitating blink. There’s no use to reading her face when my own has gone numb. My hand—I cannot tell if it’s holding hers or the iron bar at the edge of the pier, but my grip tightens, and a clog hits my throat. There’s a ticking sound coming from somewhere—out the corner of my eye, a cruise ship pulls away from shore—and life seems so fragile, a glass on the edge of the table. To stare into the eyes of who would be my new heart, and all I can wonder is if fear of it all is enough to make me leap overboard.