That Stuff which Falls Between Mother and Matter

"I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe."

Heart of Darkness

Favors fall liberally or not at all, and so it goes. . .

I ask C., "So have you given up completely?"

She asks me to clarify.

"Have you given up, y'know, on any possibility of hope or of beauty entering your life?"

It's late. I'm waiting for the naturopathic sleep aid to take effect. C. can fall asleep almost instantly; I with my pillow-talk must seem to her a gnat in her ear.

She offers me a muzzy, "No." (A tired C. is a terse C.)

"Well I have. What do you look forward to? Sure, I have some notion of improving my creaturely comfort, to have more than I have now. But is this a worthy ambition?" This question is of course rhetorical.

"Is it even an adequate ambition?" I know I've lost her to sleep by now. "I used to have dreams—visions of the future that in their depth and clarity resembled those old stereoscopic photographs—but that was before. . ." More silence from her here, but not the silence of sleep, I think.

What was jeopardized by the explosion of my former life is inestimable, the ripples carry ever forward. Dreams or no dreams, which to have? In dreams I implore D., weep before her as if in a glass cube, suffocated more by my frustration at her inability or unwillingness to hear me, than by my inability to breathe; and I scream louder and louder until my muffled sounds push damply back against my face. This is the typical dream of REM sleep.

The no-dream dream, on the other hand, is not the flakes of life awake dropping through the slumbering mind, but the projection of my imagination into the future . The bulb is burned out in the projector, however. So instead I throw blackness into black and stumble through days become grindingly the same.

How much longer can I persecute C. with my lack of a being, properly speaking? It is a sin to worry bones of wretchedness, dog in the manger I perhaps am. I almost beg to be cast off. But that C. can sleep and wake and sleep knowing that she has not yet outlived her life perhaps disposes her charitably toward me.

Meanwhile I am buoyed by the cavity anti-depressants have left in me.