twinkle meteorite, wake me up

Every night I sit in the dark and stare at this illuminated screen. I string words together like a young girl puts beads on a necklace, all in an effort to make some perfect sequence that inspires the cosmos to turn the tide in my favor. Of course, it never works but I can't give up.

I'd prefer to wake up early. I can then get to school with time to spare. She'll see me walking, headphones over my ear canals, hands in my pockets, head down watching my feet alternate in the same way that a piston repeats its process over and over in a machine. I hate to step on cracks. It makes me feel odd when I walk on non-colored tiles. I always say, "You get one step on non-colored tiles, if you do two in a row, your life is over as you know it." Many times I have taken two steps on non-colored tiles. I guess that means I died a long time ago.

Sit out on the porch and look toward the trees. The sparrow is perched on an alabaster branch which hangs downward a bit, being constantly pressured by gravity. The bird leads a life every day. A life like you or I. The bird has children or a home or a friend. Every day its miniature heart beats in the same way yours or mine does. A little boy shoots a small, metallic BB right through its skull. The fluid in its head is locked in a marriage with the air outside. It falls dead, stiff, limp. There is not a cry of grief from the insects. There is no requiem sung by the cloudcover. There is no funeral procession for the dead body. On a day like today, while life continues behind your eyes, the entire world came thundering down and tore up into a million pieces, much in the same way that Allied aircraft were brought crashing to the ground as they attempted to eviscerate the stagnant grimace of Hitler's insecurity. Darling, if I am standing out in the grass and a meteorite should penetrate the blue, depthless canvas above me and shatter my skull, let me fall lifeless to the ground. Don't let out a cry of grief. Please, sing no requiem for me. Put me not in the ground, but just let me return to everything we have come from. Let me nurture the ground and cradle a bed of flowers. Don't stop to cry over my decaying bones, don't taste blood in your throat when you think of my fate. Just admire the endless cycle of death and birth. Flowers are pretty. They smell like shit though.

My dog sits on my bed and writhes in pain. Her eyes remain halfway open and they shift about like a body of water. She snarls and winces as the complex system of levers and pullies in her head project some vile film. Her breathing speeds up, her legs shift in an effort to run. It's a hopeless attempt. The two lives we live cannot be outrun. You can move your bones as quickly as you want to, but motion is just another illusion. We're constantly waking from a dream. As we fall asleep here, we wake up in the other world. We're forever in static, frozen bodies which have nothing better to do than to attempt to emulate movement. We fear death because of pain. Pain is an illusion too. Tears mean nothing - they are the result of human instinct. You do not feel anything, feeling is an illusion. The body we reside in is more like a house and our eyes are more like windows. The windows, though, do not show anything real. They are covered up by television screens which are plugged into our bellybuttons. We watch the movies we create out of our gut instinct and our lives become so bland and mediocre that we can only fear what must be slated next.

And then that tiny piece of space-rock falls into your brain matter and in an admirable flash of light, the walls of the house fall down and up comes a cloud of earth. We clear our eyes and cough our lungs clean only to realize we no longer have a body to worry about, this is just the illusion we've been telling ourselves. We can move at any speed, we can be anywhere, we are no longer limited to the foolish confines of this fleshy apparatus. It's a world of incalculable possibility, infinite knowledge, unending time and space. It's waking up from the dream and finally being introduced to the third landscape. Suddenly death is not so frightening. But if we are without our bodies, what is anything at all? We have no hearts to pump blood, no eyes to spring leaks, no nerves to whisper torture, no legs to compete with...

If I can just see beyond the TV screen.

Glowing.

Humming.

Pulsing.

Whirring.

If I can just see beyond the light, then I can finally bathe myself in the sunshine. When my time comes to die, when my time comes to be lifted away from my bedside and brought to another bed, I will be content.

After all, I never seem to miss this place when I am dreaming. I don't miss any of you.

I think I'd like to go to sleep now. Time to wake up somewhere else.