Every inch of every step brings about a new thought and I begin reciting Whitman's Song of Myself under my breath while keeping pace, "...for every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you". I wonder where my brain would decide to go if I left it here in this puddle of water, or if I stopped thinking in terms of tomorrow or the next day, or the next day. What is now has irrelevance to the mystique of tomorrow.
I lie back in my bed, the tart taste of wine still clinging to my pallet, still resting on my breath and I become captivated by the paint that has started to peel off from the ceiling. It's a deterrent, I realize, something to sway me against the ramblings that move in waves through my mind, or the swift motions of the rise and fall of my chest. The whispers of today feel like lead upon my chest.
And these hands, too entirely soft and small, too entirely delicate to be placed anywhere else. Instead, they reach in vain for the coldness of the stones above my head, to feel the antithesis of their own flesh to feel less empty. They'll take anything, anything imperfect, anything less than they are. They are selfish, these little hands, wanting too much and sacrificing too little.
I fall in and out of sleep. The night does me an injustice, waking up the dead with its ceaseless cracks of thunder, making zombies of us all. I slip in and out of a restless dream where you are running, an American soldier, followed by a large group of Nazi soldiers. You slip into a ravine and become covered with rocks and dirt. You become unconscious, saving your own life as they step around you. You are unseen, unnoticed. They cannot decipher the earth from your body. I clear away the debris, wash it clean from your face with my white small hands. How easily the soil moves away from your pale skin. How easily you awake. You lift yourself out of the brush, a WWII soldier with uniform in tact, how easily you become clean, how easily you awake.
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