midnight city

beginnings: 


locked behind a door, beside a flawed and failing memory. 



the skyline of a midnight city

the skyline drawn from memory

the skyline drawn on my forearm

a skyline that starts to fade

a familiar face against a midnight city

a face etched into memory

a face that starts to fade.


This is what it would look like if my dreams were organized in a list, and I would have no trouble arranging them according to chronology. What came first and what came where. But as it is I awake on a pillow moist with sweat, and the slivers of my dreams appear as lines written over one another. Although some small modicum of meaning can be wrung out if I concentrate extremely hard, the number of lines that overlap and smudge into each other point to the bleak reality that something is most definitely lost forever.

This is the writer speaking now, and I feel it is important that I separate myself from the text just this one time, in the beginning. I fear what I have to say will not be completed, as different lines of thought are constantly imposing themselves upon me, threatening to rewrite whatever clarity I think I've found on this particular island in time. There is a little apple-scented candle burning in front of me and I am typing away furiously in a room with a single table and a single chair. The reason for my impatience is because I will be forced to forget everything at midnight. The apple candle will go out, the rain outside the window will turn to ice and I shall be lost to waves and waves of dreaming.

I make no attempt at honesty and if you persist in looking for it you will only be disappointed. This is fiction and none of this ever happened(all fiction is precipitated by fact, all stories stem from what is lacked). This is repeated several times and only when I have deceived myself do I begin to write: