everything about it goes around like a good story which takes a new room on a new tongue every night. I wish I could do the same but I’m not so good at convincing people to give me their time or their teeth or their mornings.
the idea is that you drop yourself and then recover on waking to find that it all hangs different on the shoulders, is less pink, more amaranth, less the leaves of a turnip flower, more the hollowed chest of a cloud after rain—
go to bed across it, maybe its sheets will muddle into a word, maybe the goose feathers will conspire into a cotton-mouthed dictation, saying ah yes, the breakthrough, the meaning, the good.
or maybe it’s just the time and how it drags through the dark like the cold body of a fish dragging through a mile of river: just about breathing without meaning to and surviving without intending survival until the thing that almost ate you the night before has starved to death, lost its ribs, its music its importance. or it could be
that you forget after you go under and come up, that if it hurts, it will have a place where it can stop hurting, and a REM cycle is just a good way to buck the hours off your nerves, not that it’s particularly curative, just that it knows how to drown minutes
out of their bodies and yours.
- c. essington