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 ^{(it's beta!)}

And I lay on the warm asphalt as the band played Seasons of Love, focusing on the one star I could see overhead. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I noticed several more stars, floating in the haze. The one directly overhead was a part of the summer triangle, which I had learned about years before. I hoped it was Vega. Vega was my favorite, largely because it was the only one whose name I could remember.

I opened my eyes wide, un-focusing them, and took slow deep breaths, filling my lungs until they hurt; exhaling until my spine felt like it was falling out of my skin. The night, yellowed from the glow of a nearby streetlight, swam and spun and the star pulsed with the beat of my heart which somehow matched the pulse of the music, even though it was way too slow.

I thought about the distance from that star to here and back again, the way the light seemed to twist and bend. All things astronomical and spiritual flashed in my head and I felt myself a moment away from epiphany but the band was too loud and much too distracting and I felt only angry and empty and cold. The pavement against my back was solid and unsteady and I resisted the urge to hold on as it circled beneath me.

The song finished, I sat up and felt much older than I had when I had first slumped to the ground. Then I found myself wanting to cry because I hadn’t changed at all, in the same way that the pavement hadn’t actually spun beneath my touch.

It was a strange dream. Then again, they always are. But this one wasn’t the usual fantasies; this one was vicious. There was no sex, no devious activities involving ninjas or even pirates, no flying, no falling, no fiction to it. It was one of the few dreams I’d ever had that actually almost could have happened.

I was beating someone with a hammer and when I finished, he thanked me and I lifted him up.

He was my sorta best friend’s ex boy-toy. A guy I enjoyed constantly confusing and occasionally beating up, gently of course. We had lunch together every single year. He’s a perverted jackass, but apparently he kisses nice.

The dream drifted in from the gray black oblivion in which I rest between dreams (like most midnight imaginings, I have no idea how I got into this situation).

There I was, standing over him, whacking away, blood flying, his skull making the sound of a melon being dropped several stories to land on rough sidewalk, again and again and again. His ribs popping and groaning, his breath wheezing out of him like the panting of an old guy with emphysema who just finished climbing the Empire State building. Bruises bloom across his shoulders, his knees… I go for the joints.

And then, for no apparent reason, I stop, drop the hammer and wipe my hair and his blood from my eyes. I take a few deep breaths and study my work. He’s missing teeth and I think his eye is going to be bruised shut for a week. He looks a lot better than he should, but I don’t care. His head is leaned back against the wall and he’s squinting at me. We wait in silence for about a minute before he sucks in enough air to say, “Thanks…” I offer him a hand and help him up.

The dream fades and I wake up, sticking to the sheets as the temperature in my room hits an easy 95. I replay the dream as quickly as I can, but even I know I’m going to remember this one.

He was the only person who I could tell didn't secretly worry about me when I said that I wanted to die before I was 35. He just threw out the retort, "Why thirty five?"

I laughed and ran my frigid hands through my hair. "Just cause. Thirty is too young, forty is too old. I've always pictured myself dying young; I could never see myself old."

"Forty isn't old," he replies, "with technology and medicine and all that crap fifty isn't even that old these days. And if your body's still good and you're still having fun, why die? Besides, what about a family and kids?"

I shudder and bite back the acidic burn of vomit from the roof of my mouth. "Not getting married, definitely NOT having kids. I want to be a teacher, live in an apartment with my library in the biggest bedroom and a pimp ass bathroom. I want to live tame in the winter and wild in the summer. If later I want kids, I'll foster, and then let them move on. Teachers are pretty good at letting kids go."

"So what? Thirty five hits and you commit suicide? I never thought you were the type-"

"No."

"Then what? You're just going to hope to die?"

"No."

"Then what's the point, if you won't kill yourself?"

"There are some ridiculously dangerous activities out there that can be done quite unsafely. You know, like SCUBA-ing in caves and sky diving and bungee jumping and rodeo and learning how to fly a helicopter. I'm sure I'll manage it somehow. Worst comes to worst I take some peyote and try to learn how to fly."

"I'm pretty sure that constitutes suicide."

"Whatever... I do want to learn how to fly though..."

"I still don't understand why. You don't seem the type to not want to live."

"There are some things I won"t be able to live with. I almost panic when I think of a normal life, you know, growing up, going to college, meeting someone "special", getting married, having kids, spending the rest of my life wishing I'd done things. And I practically hyperventilate when I remember that that's probably what's going to happen anyway. It's like being trapped. There's nowhere to go but get old, buy a house, settle, have kids get gross and die. It makes me want to scream but every time I try I end up wailing, because it absolutely horrifies me."

"So don't do those things, it doesn't mean you have to die."

"Dementia runs in my family, like bad knees and lactose intolerance. And if I ever receive that kind of diagnosis, the pills are getting swallowed the same week. I'd rather do it my way. I've had a living will since I was 12. Wrote it myself; was damn proud of that piece of paper when I was younger."

"What about everyone else?"

"What about 'em? If they love me as they claim, let them respect my wishes, lil fuckers. I do as I will. Mayhap they'll leave well enough alone."

"Don't you think it's selfish?"

"Selfish? To what? Think of myself first? I AM selfish. I know me best; there is no way, no matter all that blither about love and whatnot, that anyone could possibly 'come before me'. It's illogical. It doesn't make sense, I won't stand for it."

"Couldn't convince ya otherwise could I?"

"No. Probably not."

truth

1. Conformity to fact or actuality.

re•al•i•ty

1. The quality or state of being actual or true.

And I laugh because he swears he’s telling the truth and he hates that I always remind him, “You’re telling your truth, not the truth.”

The truth is that truth isn’t as exclusive as they say it is. It’s one of the reasons I will probably never get married, why I have such trouble connecting with others, why I have such trouble telling the truth.

Your truth is your reality. Your perception of truth and your perception of reality are resolutely and inexorably bound together

Our truths are not the same. A most basic example of how our truths differ is that you are Christian/ Jewish/ Muslim/ Buddhist/ Taoist/ Hindu/ [insert religion here] and I am not. And if so, taking into account all the truths that spring from our differences in belief, we do not occupy the same reality. And if we cannot/ do not/ will not share our truths, how can we share a reality? And if we cannot share even that; that which is both minuscule in importance and that, which is all important, how can you even presume to know me?

And it would be okay, if this was the only difference between us. We could be .999999… and 1, you and I. Close enough to touch, to seem the same even as we weren’t and were. Like those membranes they call universes. But it isn’t, so we aren’t. You might as well be the negative to this positive infinity I live in.

But how can our realities be so different when we’re 99.99% the same. We’re humans, after all. There must be something similar there boiling in that gray matter they tell us we think with.

Perhaps we live on the event horizon of some huge philosophical black hole with truth behind us and reality before us and all that matters is that we know how to laugh.

I think I could live like that.

And that’s the truth.

I pick the skin at the corners of my lips until they bleed and then rub them with my thumb. It stings a little bit, but it keeps them from pulling when I smile. Blood-streaked fingers caress purple and yellow bruises on my forearm and the back of my hand. I press just hard enough to feel them ache. A little hurt goes a long way.

My eyes are bloodshot and ringed by the dusky black flecks of dried mascara; the wet lines burn with something similar to fatigue but meaner. My hair is tangled, knotted, wavy in the places where sweat has driven away its flat iron straightness. ‘Sex hair’, my friends would call it, though it’s been years. Years since I started learning how to be lonely.

I’d like to be sleeping. I would love to be, actually. The day has been long. The month has been difficult. The year has been trying and I’ve been trying to forget it for a little while.

But that stupid nagging voice in the back of my head whines. It’s not even a voice, just a feeling, an instinct: that I should be elsewhere, doing something, moving, dancing, fucking, driving, something.

My eyelids twitch with my pulse. I’m exhausted. I trace the tail of the dragon on my bracelet again and again. Sleep, I beg heathen gods, let me sleep.

It does not come; I did not expect it to.

The rain starts slowly, with sounds I mistake for the clicking of the heater, but it soon picks up pace, pounding and beating on the skylight. I am struck with an urge to just break the window and let it rain on me but broken glass is so hard to get out of carpet and I’m just too tired.

The air around me is dry; I huddle into my myriad blankets. Their weight gives me comfort and the air encircling my face becomes damp with my breath, salving the skin beneath my nose.

My little world is an inky purple-black and I draw it closer, hoping for any sort of rest, even the twixt place, where I’m awake but dreaming. I doze, hallucinating, and quietly wait for dawn.

I have this strange idea of beauty.

I often find that people are most attractive when they cry. Bloodshot eyes rimmed with pink with the strange freckling over their cheekbones caused by rubbing away tears with the back of a hand, a tissue, a sleeve.

I love it when your eyes glisten and your nose runs and you let everything show on your face. Perhaps it’s the utter vulnerability, perhaps it’s the emotions I never seem to truly feel so openly displayed, almost as if it were easy to do so.

All I know is that I will deal with ugliness if it means never having to see you so.

He waved at me everyday, like some kind of idiot, as we passed each other on the breezeway. I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me, but he was one of the obnoxious types who truly thinks he’s being funny when people laugh as the shreds of his dignity are torn by his antics.

So.

He waved to me.

And sometimes I laughed; sometimes I ignored him; sometimes I quirked an eyebrow, but I never said a word.

And one day he wasn’t there.

The next day, as he looked for me among the students, I rushed forward, popped out from behind a pole and elbowed him hard in the gut.

He sat on his ass, hard, coughing and choking and I just walked away, smirking.

It was so worth it.