sleep, critique

This piece was published in Issue #1 of Divagations Magazine

Dreams, they have a concave shape. It’s as if to say: I will record your movements and present a report on my findings. I recognize that you differ from my other patients, having an aversion both to vast and confined spaces. To help you, I’m writing a prescription for a sense of solitude in the middle of the desert. A desert that’s also a beach. Waking up in one of the caves on its cliff face a camel in a violet suit hands you a tablet that reads в единстве сила, which in Russian means strength through unity but to you, the erudite hermit reader you, you know what’s really written. The camel takes off his sunglasses as he enters and his shoes, of which there are only two, are traded for a set of crimson slippers embroidered with the icon of Versace in a silken gold thread. On your knees you both rather quickly pray to the god of the sea and he, the camel, sitting on his folding metal chair, lights a cigarette and asks if you’d like to read it out loud. But he asks like your boss asks you if you’re willing to stay a little later just to wrap things up (just this one time), so you nod your head tired and pick up the stone tablet and open your mouth to speak and in a perfect Petersburg accent read the archaic Cyrillic typeface as he, legs crossed eyes closed silently nodding his exceptionally long face, as he looks at you as he looks at the sea and the tablet. Your mouth is shaped like all those in Eastern Europe with your tongue resting against the floor instead of the roof. As you cast from this seaside grotto a force of harmony that transcends border and nationality you remember the similarities between the shapes of waves in the sea and in the sky when the gulls fly in the form of a ‘v’. And as your voice pulls from its depths this galvanizing string of syllables you hear, or rather you feel that instead of strength through unity in Russian you’ve said, in English, that the end of arts and sciences will come in the next three years. The camel, whose name you understand to be Joe, smiles as he watches the approaching storm and says That’s right buddy, she’s a-comin', she’s a-comin' fast... 

Dreams, like music, they have a concave shape. They undergo several mutations before they must be made into pieces and put back together like a broken vase. You can use glue and spray paint, or if you had a few extra dollars some gold leaf and insist that you are treating the breakage of the object as part of its history; that you’re practicing kintsugi, whose beauty comes from understanding the doppler effect of memory but (if we’re being honest) you had seven rough new objects with pristine jagged ignorant juvenile edges and instead of relishing in this rarity for even a moment you’ve chosen to put it back together with its self left spilled all over the floor. You’ve succeeded in making something new not despite an unfortunate event, but because you have no place for edges like these lying around the house. Your dog could get it, or your kid could put it in their mouth or, god forbid, you live alone and lose track of it and a few years later you get a raise for all your hard work at the company and when you slide into bed and shut your eyes and cross your t’s and dot your i's you feel, right against your little toe, the acrimonious denouement of this ravenous porcelain fragment. It opens its mouth and places right along a set of sharpened canines your tired leather paws, preparing a little keepsake, a small memento of your choice, your decision to recompose that forgotten composition which you so unceremoniously fractured.