I had a dream that I was driving away away. I drove into a reoccurring dream. I drove into a familiar apartment complex with horrible parking. The enclosed housing towered and leaned over me while I cruised to find a spot. I came to see a friend that my heart would be glad to see. It was always tricky walking up those uneven and treacherous stairs. Shifty, birdy eyes peeked out from curtains to watch me. I ignored them to focus on the tricky stairs.
I stepped inside and greeted my bustling friend. She had a baby on her hip and chores to handle. She buttered me with overly excited and thoughtless small talk. It was nice to see her anyway.
I left feeling like an intruder to meet at an amusement park. I don’t remember it being flashy or fun-looking. But we got into a wide and rectangular boat anyway. The ride jolted slightly when it started and we started to loop upside down. I went to grab the restraints to find that we didn’t have any. No one panicked. Gravity lifted me upside-down towards the floor. No one saw me hanging on by my perspired hand. “No,” I said it with conviction so that I felt myself wake up a little. The boat hung upside down and swung side to side until I let go. I fell with a small exhale and a thud. The boat finished its loop and flew on. It didn’t hurt. I was only embarrassed and afraid that I was dead. My arms were contorted and broken, so I stayed face down and embarrassed that I had been the only one to fall out.
The week after a visit to the dentist, I fell asleep in the middle of the week and climbed a cylinder tower with a straight staircase to the garden rooftop. I found a former acquaintance waiting for me. He was so arrogant that he didn’t talk. He just stood there with a strong jaw line and crossed arms. He pursed his lips and chin. I didn’t care. He led me to his pretentious loft with glass walls and snooty 360 view. The city glittered from far off like lit bokeh in photographs. I tried to ignore my awkward and arrogant acquaintance. He looked at me cross armed.
I drove home in a rebellious looking top down and wiggled a loose tooth. I looked up to find myself at a public bath. Like the ones they had in ancient Greece. The walls were white and slick with condensation. The room was full of nude, bathing women. My loose tooth fell out. And then a molar. They all began to slide out in turn. I had a handful of teeth before I could understand how it was happening. I stood there amazed and invisible to the bathing women with a row of gums instead of teeth.
I went to sleep with a crook in my eyebrows. I went to sleep with a miscommunication looming over me. I spoke too soon and with a sharpened tongue. Someone said to me “Hurt people hurt people.”
I woke up and she was in a big tulle dress. She has a round face with big pores. She’s wearing too much glittery powder on her eyelids and too much clumpy mascara on her lashes, but she could she herself clearly. Not fogged by abuse or molested or full of mistakes or overweight, but simple and happy. Because even people with scarred and rotting hearts want to be happy on their wedding days. I watched with a convincing unhappy smile. This is the frame of my childhood house. The shaken and shouting house on Belgrave. I couldn’t be happy for an unhappy person. Everyone that can possibly understand is unhappy. Only the innocent were happy.
We came home and she said, “I can’t do it anymore. Let’s sit down with her and have a talk,” she shouted at me, “What, do you think I’m happy?” I am shaken and shouting. I’m my childhood house on Belgrave. I’m the house with a sliding glass door that scratched its metal border as it opened. The cement with the plastic igloo house and the plot of grass that would seem much smaller if I went back. The line of tall trees that served to be the consistent and quiet. She said to me without traces of regret that she didn’t want to know anymore.
I had a dream that I was not as understood and not as wanted to be understood and then I fell asleep.
I fell asleep after grazing over the faces and figures of beautiful women.
I woke up in a dream that Memphis functioned underneath a propaganda machine. The machine was fine tuned and private and vulgar. The machine stifled confidence and dignity, but it was beautiful so the city pressed on to toil quietly.
I had a dream that I was standing with my nose pressed against the glass. I was looking into an aquarium that held my childhood backyard inside. There was a channel of water passing through it, rich with things that the sea likes to eat. There was a group of disfigured lobsters scavenging for food. Their tails had been torn off and eaten by rich people so they walked on their front claws. They gathered around the rich water channel and were reaching out for scraps that passed by when something large and ominous startled them and hurried them away.
It was a children’s soccer game. They scored goals into the wall of eight foot trees that looked like furry pencils. When I lived there, I used to jump through them blindly and have faith that the brick planter would catch me. Nervous betting adults paced inside the living room and looked out the window at the hustling kids.
Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in a film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.
Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale or the evenings too long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.
Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.
Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.
Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.
Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.
Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.
Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life.
I had a dream that I came dressed in my favorite outfit. White t-shirt tucked into blue jeans tucked into cowboy boots. And my friend lamented, “I wish you were a little bit taller. You would be tall enough to be a model.” And I pranced away in pity, repeating, “I wish I were smarter, I wish I were funnier, I wish I was skinnier, I wish I was richer, I wish I were prettier…”
I had a dream that I walked into a school cafeteria and sat at a table. A man who spoke a language I did not completely understand began to speak to us. I was obliged to smile and nod and laugh. I found another wisdom tooth poking out while he spoke. The old man talked about men and their tendency to search after girlfriends even while being married, “If a man has enough energy to lift a spoon, he will chase after other women.” A movie about suicidal love and fake pregnancies and naval academies distracted me on a nearby screen. He advised that when I found a man of my own, that I should bury any extra money to prevent him from giving it away to his girlfriends. He advised that we participate in good deeds together as to keep his mindset straight. He spoke and I eyed my quesadilla.
I had a dream that I met a reluctant leaf. The leaf was implored to become a flower and then a bud and then a fruit. It shouted at the vine out of exhaustion and fear, “I only wanted to be a leaf, but you implored me so I became a flower and then a bud and now I am a fruit but I am so strained that I am about to fall! Why have you done this to me?” The fruit fell to the ground and sprouted to become a tree and the leaf said, “Forgive me.”