the fading

The dogs go off and I’m awake, eyes snapped open to the gossiping dark. The mind races then it idles, finding traction in the little details while the brain is still telling stories to itself. That fleeting awareness of the multitude lurking behind the sense of identity, the name and place and where you left your pants and keys. The barking long gone before I am down to one, the ache and dread and regrets that make up this self. The sorrowful sense of loss waking into being. The legion descended into hints and whispers and the tingling of my spider sense. Shapes and shadows and portents of doom past the animal gnashings and the daily debts left unmet. I switch on the light, and I am back to the long alone.

The house is quiet, the dogs out hunting the rat army, the cats alluding to sleep and roofs. I swallow the available tonics, the dosing that moves the marker down the field, the black hot ichor that passes for coffee at these hours in between. These sacraments burnt on the altar of the big empty, the vacuity that drags me through the world as the world runs through me. The mingling of earth and sun, the leaves and flowers of the continuity, the blood and bones of other birthed beings that bear the brunt of all this useless suffering and beauty. Toothache from a mouthful of broken teeth, the aches from the spent systems and busted architecture, the words that dig and multiply through the trembling furrows that pass for sentience in this flesh. These dreams that break me like the rocky shore breaks the stubborn tide linger through the day.

In these dreams of late it is largely those I lost, to death and to the fading as my company loses favor and I stop clinging and inserting myself into their lives. They are dreams largely of the past tense, conversations and pleasures I miss with people that I knew and love. Sometimes there is the wandering, which is most of my traditional remembered dreaming, headed for a location or trying to get somewhere through strange cities and unknown woods. But lately it has been the dead ended, the residue of acrimony, the dislike and the disappointment that leads me away from where I’m not wanted. The sense of the lost love looking wearily away, having hoped never to see me again. Fragments of words from other rooms bearing contempt and malice. Intercessors trying to shake and harm me, seemingly unaware of my unyielding capacity for rage and violence. The horror of being backed into a corner, the grief of my boundless limits. Missing fiercely someone that won’t embrace me again, and demonstrating again and again every reason why. Failing as I wake, fading as I live and breathe.