But there are snakes inside.
One coils ever tighter around my heart and laughs. Another guards the rib cage, all smug. Another shoots venom into my gut. Another squeezes its head into my skull and talks to you through my mouth, my eyes. My breath, my only weapon.
Exhale. Expand.
Robots, the lot of them.
See myself from the outside.
In her apartment she makes a map of the dream world. Detailed pathways, buildings and symbols cover the walls and ceiling. Start to form a pool on the bare floorboards. Pencil, charcoal, paint, blood. Any kind of stain she can find. Furniture permanently draped in fabric like her unwashed body in overalls, her hair in a messy bun. Step ladders for those dimensions not so easily reached.
He dreams another dream in another reality. The version I see before me: how could he ever prove he was more than a figment, more than a memory of a person I once knew?
I see him from afar, guitar case in hand, pack on back. So familiar, yet so other. A part of me gone astray for years [eaten by snakes]. The voice, the heart, the soul. I know them all so well.
Agency: The capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices.
I have a problem with agency.
A loosening of chains. An awakening. A sense of learning to drive this thing.
Connect to the mainframe, to the dreamframe. Plug in to the life source. But search for something unique when alone and separate. Something to write home about.
She gets a letter one day, all parchment paper and fountain pen and sealed with the sign of an open eye [cog]. It tells her of the snakes and the ladder. She rolls a one, and she falls down.
I’m trying something out here. Looking for patterns, rhythms and connections in journaling and beauty in fragments. I’m looking for the point at which communications breaks down between writer and reader, where intrigue fails and where the key to subjectivity may lie. I’m freeing myself up. I join personal beats with character perspectives and notes for plot, as ever to play with the boundaries between fiction and reality. I’m looking for the line to ride.
Header Image Source: Pixabay
C.R. Dudley 