The Man in White

A man with black skin, dressed in white, sits on the beach under palm trees; book in hand and a cup of hot lemon accented black tea. Something has caught his attention, and so he runs toward the beach only to collide, full force, with a small framed body. He clutched his arms tight around the figure and swung himself counterclockwise toward the dry dense section of shrubbery that separated the beach from the rest of the island. 

My alarm clock snatched me from my slumber. The rain that greeted us four and a half hours earlier, still kissed the window pain just outside my room. It was four a.m. I sat up in bed, looked around the room and took a deep breath. The wind that traveled into my room and thus into my lungs escorted in the smell of freshly cut grass and hydrangeas. The room was quiet and solid with stillness. I was awake. 

But, the dream was escaping me. The details that were, just a second ago, vividly robust were now fading; fragmenting into pieces of nothing. I didn’t quite understand it. I didn’t quite understand what it meant. Sigmund Freud argued that dreams are a manifestation of our psychic past, but I had yet to live this, or at least in the literal sense. In what ways had I been here before? In what ways had this abstraction been a part of me?

Freud also argues that the dream is the fulfilment of the repressed wish. Was I the man in white? What I the figure? Had I repressed my desire for a relationship with my father so much that a seemingly perfect scenario came to me, hypothetically, in my slumber? I guess all those times I was stood up by my dad, all those times he never showed up for me, caused my desires just ball themselves up in my subconscious and haunt me in my sleep. Moreover, I guess I never really dealt with my desire for a platonic relationship with my dad because with Freud’s arguments as foundation, C.G. Jung argues that “the thought is repressed because it is too disagreeable,” and that “the wishes from the dream-thought are never desires which one openly admits to oneself, but desires that are repressed because of their painful character; and it is because they are excluded from conscious reflection in the waking state that they float up, indirectly, in dreams.” But then again, Freud could never really discover the functions of the dream world so, in a sense it’s all hypothetical– the man on the beach, the figure, even the beach itself. All of Freud’s findings were hypothetical

. 

Maybe i’m running with this idea of Freud’s “psychic past” and the “dream-thought” and maybe it’s all just a manifestation of my unrealistic idealistic emotional connection to Nights in Rodanthe, or some Nicholas Sparks film; all bullshit. Or maybe I am neither the figure or the Man in white. Or maybe I’m both. All I know is that the world is not always kind to use; it gives and feeds but it also deprives us of the things we know that we deserve. Those desires that have been suppressed for as long as we know dont only confront us in reality, but they also confront us in the dream world; the place we travel to each night in order to escape our reality only to be confronted with a skewed enigmatic version of it.

This Bitter Earth

The sun was setting over the ocean. We sat for a while after in an effort to witness our bodies slowly merge with the darkness. It was kind of poetic. How could we turn into nothing this way? How could the elements remind us that we are nothing here? 

Our bodies became nothing in ways that were unfamiliar to us. I guess the obvious question is in the end, where do we stand? Where do we stand in this place? Here. On the earth. The girl combed her fingers through her hair and took a deep breath. I thought it was because she was simply in awe of the way the sky’s light had left us – abruptly, poetically  but the words that followed were not of admiration. 

“Why are we here?” she said. I sat and thought for moment about what she’d meant. Why are we here? What are we here for? I couldn’t figure out why she’d asked this question. What about all of the beauty that had crescendoed and then decrescendoed, made her ask such an existential question.  

I think the way we’ve moved indoors and at the rate at which we’d done so sort of skewed our understanding of our purpose as human beings on this planet and if you ask me, we’ve done more harm than good; the earth’s light dwindles, disease and greed plague the air. Whole species falling away from the fabric of existence. 

“Did you hear me?” she asserted. Her voice ripped me from my thoughts. I guess I’d been sitting in silence for longer than I’d thought. But, I couldn’t help it. This existential question made it hard to come to a speedy response. “Yeah, I heard you, love.” I said. “… and i’m not sure I know anymore.” I thought for a while when I was younger that I would travel the universe in search of lifeforms but as I got older, that idea faded. I’m also not even sure that would even answer her question. 

We exist in this life so unnaturally, with clothes and homes. The world should be our home. 

I took my shoes off, then my socks and stood up. I felt tall looking down at the world. I shrugged my shoulders and moved my hands from where they were, to the top of my head and intertwined my fingers together. 

“I don’t know why we are here. All I know is that we are here.”

“But doesnt it matter to you?”

“What?”

“Why.”

“Why what?”

“I’m starting to think you’re deaf.”

I was avoiding the question. Not because I didn’t want to answer it, but because as I got older, it really mattered less and less– the notion of purpose. I didn’t know the answer. Reality would break her heart because I know how hard she loves. I know that she has this obsession with it. 

My fear was that if I said anything other than love – that what we are here to do is something other than love – that it would break her heart. My fear was that in that moment, she was just searching for affirmation – someone to remind her that all there is in this life is love. All we are here to do is love. But I’m not so sure anymore. 

I looked at her. 

This bitter earth, well what a fruit it bears. And if my life, is like the dust that hides the glow of a rose. Then what good am I? 

“Heaven Only knows.”

“I know, and that’s what frightens me.”

“What?” 

“The idea the secrets of life…” 

The girl who loved proceeded to remove her shoes 

“…the reason for our lives will only be revealed to us in death. Then what good is it? To walk the earth forever in search of something that we will never find?” 

The way that the words “never” came from her lips sent chills up my spine. It was over pronounced, like the backs of women over exerting themselves in life. 

She removed her shoes, her socks, her trousers, and then her bra and walked toward the ocean. 

“This bitter earth.” she whispered. 

Not a soul was in sight, only the light that came from the city that lit up the currents of the ocean. It seemed brighter before. 

The girl who loved submerged one foot and then the other, then her calves, her knees, her thighs, her waist, her torso, her neck until nothing could be seen of her. 

Her body being tossed and abused by the ocean she’d played next to when she was a child, without worry. Without quarrel.  

She walked.

A Dream (Jan. 25, 2017)

This is the recount of a dream I had on the day before my mothers birthday. It was strangely emotional and real. The setting was at my grandmothers house in Newark only the setting itself was distorted, almost like I had been in some alternate universe so it was strange and oddly decadent. This is what happened.

---

There was a stench in the air. Almost thick enough for no one to notice it. Maggots and flies swarming, plaguing the air, but no carcasses. 

He seemed so resolved. I chased him out of the front door, this figure from my youth that I’d had this strong emotional belonging with– this strong emotional connection with. “But where are you going?” I said. He didn’t respond. He only looked and stared and continued to walk down the stairs that at one point he had climbed. “What are you thinking, please tell me!” I said. “I don’t think,” he mouthed walking backward. “Wait what? I cant hear you!” He repeated the movement with his mouth, almost as if it were secret. 

The stench was louder here, and so was the presence of the flies; outside, in the air. But I ignored it because so did he, continuing to talk with flies walking across his face and eyeballs. “I don’t think!” He screamed. It’s almost as if I’m asleep, like I’m living in a reality I cant control!“ I stopped. Everything seemed to move backward, like a moment of clarity or revelation. "Well promise me you’ll try to find out why! Promise me you’ll try to find who sits in the sky!” He looked, then stormed away, with a suitcase I didn’t notice before. 

And there it was, the culprit of the stench. My eyes had walked with him, and halted on a tree, were birds that had be gutted and hung in form and action like the work from an untalented taxidermist. Only it was as if God had sent arrows from the sky to murder and stop them. One fell from the tree from which it was planted previously. I couldn’t make sense of it. Only that I understood, I’d lost a friend and brother to the unnatural forces of this world.