05:13 pacific standard time

i don't know why i still dream about you. we were in a hospital. not to convalesce. we were just there, in the building. white walls, polished floors still blinding in shadowy memory. then a friend came to visit and suddenly we have people in common. the friend is strange. someone i feel i don't know well. she has a pockmarked face and stringy hair. there is something brutish about her, like she spends her free time punching walls. i get in the car, in the backseat because that is where i sit and you get in the front. you look different, sparsely bearded and pudgy, now, like everyone else. towheaded. average. i try to hold my tongue but silence has never been one of my strengths. eventually, it all comes out. a tumble of dream words from a wounded woman's mouth. you are cruel. your mouth is cruel, twisted and pinched. you scoff, you say it's the same old story, the same lies i told your brother (who i never met), the same lies i tell everyone else. the car stops and your new girl gets in and suddenly you are all moony eyed kissy-faced; with glee in your voice you tell everyone how you're going to buy all these things at the mall, new shoes and new kicks from banana republic--then you correct yourself. shoes, kicks. they're the same thing. you can't bear to be wrong. i do not look at you, at the back of your head, your hair sticking up in the unkempt mess that was always so adorable. your girlfriend is small, a slip of a thing, matchstick wrists, slender thighs. i am a giant next to her, a dark thing no one wants to touch. i want to tell you: you can't buy men's shoes at banana republic, but i don't. the brute in the driver's seat begins to talk, her voice like grains of sand underfoot, she tells us the sense of smell is the weakest sense, but women have more sensitive olfactory glands than men. i want to ask, is it because the sense is so weak that it always leads us down the wrong path? the car darts and maneuvers, moving too fast on a city street, at night, everything fluorescent yellow and black and navy blue outside the windows. another friend seems to apparate next to me and i tell her how you heartbroke me, i say it loud enough for you to hear; in the dream, i sob, i say you broke my already burdened heart, because people die, and men leave, and i can never get the timing right.

and the scene changes. i'm watching an episode of grey's anatomy. meredith weeps over the father she never had. in the episode, all the characters are dreaming, daydreaming, they separate themselves from their bodies, the separation represented by some digital magic, their spirits are sucked out and waver, watercolored shadows hovering over their own bodies. behind them, reality makes itself known, ghostly patterns, melodramatic scenes to the tune of a gently plucked acoustic guitar.