Hey this is uh, this is dream.
Something broke the surface, emerging from our empty calendar. A black SUV drifts down a cold breeze on a highway passing past painted barrios and washed tropical desert. Harsh fireflies grace the picture. It feels wrong, like it’s not quite dark enough yet. Like they’re too mechanical, their pairs a little too close. Rigid dancers in the pouring rain. Under the moon roof, a hint of headache and pressure contaminates my focus, something I’m trying to place somewhere between my placid eyes and the crystals on the glass.
Around a corner, blur sound, repeat.
There’s a valley around us, with short trees and sparkling landfills. The next one would have them too; metal, plastic, mattresses, rocks. I think about the fake plastic colours, draining in light under the clouds; the piles writhing like spawn in soda tones.
It seems unrealistic.
Something uncomfortable shifts in my chest. My eyes close, shoulders and head supported by a grey fleece that fills the backseat corner. Awkward and soft. Rust and purple.
I can still feel the pressure.
A long breath passes from me like an alpine wind through blue green treetops. There’s a valley around us, details of calcified trees and human nature. The feeling of something warm and sad wraps itself around each rib and vertebrae.
I start slipping…
And fall asleep.
“Kri!” A woman’s voice launches me into a dull projection,
“Kriaa?”
There’s an abrupt movement, but everything is still out of focus. Nothing but amber light surrounds me, struck by golden wounds and earthy veins.
I’m standing?
“Kriaa!” Relief is a clear pitch.
Now a vague figure stands beside me, but that’s not my name.
Where have I heard it then?
“Let’s go already!” The world shifts forward, as oak and maple leaves become clear.
That’s right.
Kriaa was a character name, a few had been called that before.
Soon the forest is replaced with purple stone; a quick glance shows nothing but stars and empty space at the edges of the platform we drift across. The woman has her arm in mine, but her face is still blurred.
Blurred?
Something you can’t see in any case, without shape, without color.
“Eric disappeared earlier,” she says. Her voice seems to come from all around me.
“But I’m sure he’ll be back for tonight.”
As the dream started, it fades, slowly turning into colours and shapes. I feel a strange type of sadness.
The type that belongs in meaningless dreams.
Consciousness touches me softly, escaped daybreak tendrils at the tips of a mountain range. A dirt road spirals off into the hills mid afternoon, where groups of sheep huddle on each horizon and barbed fence-work sprouts up in tangles. I slowly gather up my vision like a spool of twine, the nerve endings in my skin shattered glass sweepings. Another few silent moments inside my head and more of my body wakes. My back flexes in, my arms lazily snapping out. Tectonic metal in chain-like lengths, segment against segment releasing heat through my muscles.
Still tired.
Nothing to hear still but the noise of tires and road, which is hardly a sound as it is. What day is it now?
Tuesday. Right.
I stare into the endlessly rising hills, dead-colored ocean waves without the charm of depth. Something switches as I’m out of focus, and the whole world seems to speed up in movement around me like a video. It feels wrong as my hands jerk about before my eyes. I shut my eyes gently, sinking back. A faint ache of cold runs down my skin. A lot of nothing can happen in an instant, I think, but many instants?
It doesn’t matter really.
Time’s running circles in a cold clock. Nowhere to sit. The seat belt holster presses into my lower back like a crowded room. A crowded space, as it has been for hours, whether I’m lying down or not. Sleeping or not. Which is…
Funny.
I’m becoming used to it, though it hurts. I can feel restlessness growing under the resignation now.
I wade through a cold marsh in my stomach. Long moss grows off the branches of living oaks.
I close my eyes to a toad-song lullaby.