Six hundred six days.  One year, 7 months, 27 days. I had to stop.  By November, the dreams, the things I found… those things could not be written.   They were… too dark… too personal, and my friend from all those decades before, her expression…  I saw her photograph now after all these years in dreams. So much grief. It all came together in a way that no one would have believed anyway.   There was no way I could say more than this.

So, I wrote of other things, kind of… things long past, just… not that.  And certainly not the dreams that preceded… That.

So by April, after a succession of these dreams… and the waking events that they seemed to foretell (Haiti… that one did not even bother to be a dream) I stopped.   And that day, that oppressively sunny January day, so awake with its unexplained deep foreboding, knowing but not knowing what.  Tectonic plates 8 miles down, warping; animals unencumbered by reason and that distracting neural static we love to call intellect… Yes, people say the animals know; I knew, I just didn’t know what.

That 24 hours was so relentlessly oppressive… it makes a human standing there on the ground forced to witness it, to re-evaluate, everything.   It’s as though everything had lead up to that point, that undeniable Occam’s Razor moment of inevitability that drives one into the horrible logic where everything that had been previously believed, must of necessity be cast aside, because there is no time left for clutching onto silly belief.  Not the god fantasies… not the stuporing belief in afterlife… not the absurd and hellish procrastination engendered by dreams of endless reincarnation… only the transitive… the fragile… this tenuous existence that hangs precariously moment to moment until it snaps.

And then… it is gone.  Where it had not been… it became.   Held precious for that briefest of moments in this scheme of things, and then in the next moment it is gone again, never to return.

Oblivion… consciousness… this world… oblivion.  That simplest and most terrifyingly elegant of all solutions.   And you have no where to go because you know that just because it’s the solution you do not want makes no difference in the face of it’s utter and total logical veracity.   And in that instant of clarity you know it is true… you know.  You see it in all its complete and undeniable truth.

And so you are forced… compelled, to stand in witness of it… here, in this, on this, world.

And then it simply ended.   Near the end of the day on that cool, sunny, and utterly hollow and fathomless January afternoon, it just ended for over a quarter million souls.

So by April, even as the Deepwater Horizon unstopped a plug in a hole that should have never been created… it barely mattered anymore.   I was already, gone.

I had became… young again lol. Yeah. Really.  I just was.   Of course I had that nagging feeling that I was simply escaping, running, playing when I should have been working and writing, but… I didn’t care… I was having fun.   And my dreams… my dreams became dreams of there… there in that world… happy dreams… friends urging me to leap… jumping rooftop to rooftop. Dreams that called out to play and explore.   Yes, these were my dreams… for 600 days, no disasters, no foreboding, no apocalypse.

Immersed so deep in that alternate cyber reality, falling in love again and again, hearts broken, emotions shattered, happily living and becoming what I could never be except in dreams, I played.

By that November I had so completely become what I was inside that cyber reality, that I cried everyday for 10 days when it began to fall apart… that world trying to touch this, and I knew it could no longer be (and that was just nine months in).   Even so I knew I was no where near stopping.  But I knew I had to somehow extricate myself… I knew I had to come back to… This.

I learned that I love people deeply, that I always had.   I don’t know… I’m just trying to explain this… explain where I’ve been these last 600 days.

And now it looks like somehow I am back… nothing left to draw me back into that world.  Young friends, laughing, crying, all gone their different ways… and me… I think I’m back.

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