skin on skin

Last night I dreamed words. I read them as the dream advanced like a scroll of typeface, large enough to read through the veil of consciousness and sleep. Paper flying off the typewriter, scenes of dreams flipped through with the fervor of devouring literature you feel is changing your life. In my dream, I was aware and focused on the ideas motivating the sentences. I figured my Adderrall had not worn off and now I was trying to be productive even in my dream. I am a madman, I thought. I am a workaholic. I cannot put down my pen. I cannot lay down my mind. I wanted to wake. I woke. Still covered in sleep, I tried to move to write down the ideas I had in my dream. I had been writing my novel. These were perfect metaphors. This is what I had been searching for in waking life. I could not unclothe myself from the sheets of dreams though, so I fell back asleep, convinced the ideas were too substantial to forget. I forgot them. I have lost the words. The sensational has passed. I should have written it down. I cannot remember what it was.

Staring into a colorless space in the night, my last thought was that I wish I were sleeping skin on skin. Skin on skin, I said. My sheets had the texture of petals, and with my cheek pressed against its warmth, the bed swallowed me like a rose that closed up. In the flower was an unreal reality of dreams. It seemed like my eye was pealed open against a window of glass, highly designed like a mosaic. You could not see through the window, all you received was the impression of pattern, a kaleidoscope of colorful shapes—this may have been a better gift. I do not know. I do not know what laid behind or beyond that window in the landscape. Maybe even nothing.

These dreams felt weird. They were imbedded with a thematic like an oeuvre of writing. My work seeps in whenever and wherever. I cannot reject its permission. Do I sound passive? Maybe. I probably would sound different aloud. A guy in my program said I had a high voice. No not in tone, he said, but in class. When you speak, I feel like I should have to kiss your hand. You have a royal voice. I do not recognize my voice if I hear it. It sounds unfamiliar. I picture a delicate female speaking. Is that really me?

There were three assortments of dreams. The first I was entirely intoxicated and I had no memory. I slept with this blonde swimmer who went to my high school. It was like a pause in a party scene. I carried on quickly after, disregarding the act and waking in the morning unworried. Days went by and I discovered that he had been begging to talk to me. Did I take the morning after pill? He kept promising that he had told me we had no been safe, that it had all gone wrong. He said this and I faintly remembered, but I had not cared. I had been drunk and without memory. I would probably be pregnant, except there was less probability and more definitive truth.

The dream lapsed into another. There was a social gathering. An ex-boyfriend was there. This was the first I had seen him since being in town. He had a girlfriend. He tried to have sex with me. He did. I did not want him to. Something slipped into my mind that maybe I was pregnant. It felt good. I said, this is why I miss sex. We were interrupted by someone else in the room. I looked at my ex-boyfriend and thought he was an asshole. He had no idea what he was doing with himself, so he was with me physically and according to a title with someone else. But mentally, I had no idea who he was with.

I woke up at 7:30 am, took a few bites out of an “insomniac brownie” that had been delivered last night and fell back asleep. Then my dream went into another dream. Supposedly this guy, who has been contacting me for months trying to tempt me into cheating, was “bucking” alone on a table. The girl who told me was laughing and saying it was the biggest spectacle. My alarm went off and I could not believe how my nighttime had turned absurd. Then I realized that once again I was more responsible than not for my dreams. Before sleeping, my last thought had been a wish for skin on skin. It was a dream that became a dream, but not the dream I dreamed of having. I woke and wrote the below. Once again avoiding writing my Manhattan piece due tomorrow. There is no doubt that I be home by 8:30 pm and be too exhausted to think. Thursday morning I will probably end up gluing together something to be turned in. I want to name it, but more significantly reflect, Solitude in the Heart of Manhattan. The professor it is for keeps reading my weekly reflections to the class. Her voice reading my words makes me sound like the most sentimental soul. But who knows, what I really am, because a girl in class got up from her chair yesterday and turned around to me and said she thought I was arrogant. I wish I had thanked her for her thought and told her there was a gold star waiting for her at the front of the class that she could place next to my name.

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Daily framing a new being was your perception. Piece by piece the chipping of time, hour by hour, the evolution of momentary selves stretching into space and shaping someone more specific—(you hope someone more substantial). During evolution your fibers are being threaded tight with substance, pulling you closer to your heart. Listening for the lyrics in the rhythmic gestures is an ear pressed against your chest, hearing how it pumps out the words, “thump thump”. Secrets rise off the surface, dampening the island of your body with a sigh suspended like a cloud in air. It moves delicately, as if not at all, and can be passed as a whisper to a lover through sheets stitched with sultriness. Skin on skin is the dream you dreamed for. Skin on skin became a dripping realism, palpable and tangibly torn at, drawing the scent of blood. Skin on skin was a dream, but not the dream you dreamed of having. You fall asleep with skin on skin, dreaming of the other type of skin you dreamed you would be dreaming upon. A skin intricately woven with affection, not affectation, so it is sensuously layered with a deeper self. Giving the imagination a fleshy fabric it can bring to life. You want to wake with him pressing into the soft cushion of your ass. You want to hover over his sleepy pose and smile at his flesh, imprinted with your naked shoulder. But no, not last night. Pulled down on to the sheets of dreams, you treated this skinned figure like a wax doll, molding his figure as you went deeper into the realm of your night’s other. In the darkness, perception frames new beings, not through sight but by touch. Against the morning light, you wake to see internal relations have deformed his image and so, you tare apart the stitching of skin on skin, threaded loosely with heart.