i got lights in my head

he said, “it’s all in your head” and I said,
“so’s everything,”
but he didn’t get it.

Are you there?

At 8:04 a.m. all hell broke loose. The red-faced little girl punched nearby stomachs and toppled desks, glared into my eyes angrily, not seeing. I sensed we shared a similar propensity for destruction. My voice rose in fury, startling both of us. She stopped, sat down in a chair shakily, staring at me wide-eyed. I cooly sipped at my coffee. Later that afternoon, Florin sang “Material Girl” and “I Feel Like a Woman” as we handed out happy faces and wrote notes for tired mothers. I hid in the bathroom at the end of the day, too tired to talk to anyone. It felt like high school fallen down the rabbithole.

String your mindbeans and make smooth seams between now and then. Every time you say you love me it feels like natural sunlight I know it’s real. I see everything with softened edges these days. It pays to be crazed.

Dream, 6/21:
Joe, Alan, Phil and I were in the St. Mary’s Church parking lot, across the street from my old Catholic elementary school. I had just returned from borrowing a chinese checkerboard from a store a few minutes away, and we were debating visiting Pete at Nice ‘n Easy where he was working. Phil kept assessing the situation compulsively, and it was making me more and more nervous. Suddenly, we heard a plane very close to us. We turned and panicked as we watched the plane go down a few miles away. Seconds later, the ground shook and we were knocked off our feet by a thunderous explosion. We screamed and began running in the opposite direction as flaming hunks of metal whizzed by. Alan screamed, “flaming chunks of baby!” I ran behind the church and was thinking only of keeping myself alive.

After the metal stopped flying past, there was machine gunfire. It sounded like I was caught in a video game. I was desperately clinging to the walls of the church, making my way down to the ground and holding my jacket over my head as if to protect it, as the gunfire slowly ate away at the church around me. The sky was on fire. I heard screaming, and everything swirled into chaos. I woke up suddenly, with floaters still in my vision, my pulse racing.