Sleep Well Juliet
“Sorry I’ve been away so long. I’ll come home tonight.” The usual platitudes I spew down the phone knowing full well how childish I’ve been acting. I just had to get away, clear my head. I couldn’t do it myself - you know how these things are.
After that experience I had with The Other Place I was hit with a violent case of sudden onset clairvoyance: I saw everything that was going to happen to me; I saw all the terribly convoluted paths I had to take. I knew that I would have to say yes to horrible things, that I would have to destroy my body just because they’d ask me to. I saw myself in immaculate detail.
I ate bugs with chopsticks and worms with a fork, I drank horse piss lemonade in the backrooms of a packed out bar. They took an MRI of me while I was covered with two hundred rattlesnakes, the sound of it almost drowned out the incessant whispers and murmurs of the cosmic microwave.
After replacing my blood with a substance so thick it barely qualified as a liquid, they gave me everything I ever wanted. I was happy and it suited me. I stopped knowing what was going to happen and started caring again. I holidayed in Italy with a beautifully sun-tanned girl. She took me dancing then moved in ways I thought unimaginable. She told me things that I’d thought only I knew. We drank wine on mountains and tasted fish by the sea. We kissed like wrought iron and then pried ourselves apart to pass homegrown vegetables over handmade everythings.
Our house was tastefully empty and our garden accidentally overgrown.
I passed out at a rooftop bar on my friends 47th birthday and as I was carried out onto the pavement on a really quite comfortable stretcher I started to have visions again. Visions of all the things I can do, and all the faces I can name, and every piece of pub trivia I’ve ever learnt. As the stretcher collapsed into the ambulance I was moved to a laminated chip-board desk in a small but comfortable apartment. I was slightly cold, mostly fine, and my legs hurt with the aches of days well spent.
They put me to work at that desk: write down every uninteresting thing that has ever happened to you. Five months later, sitting there alone, I was left with an untouched pen, a blank white page and a smile on my face that never really went away. The doctors told me that nothing was wrong with me, that I could go home to her and all the stuff we lived amongst. As I slotted my key that I’d cut to look like the skyline of her favourite city into the brass lock of our plain wood door, it swung wide open bathing our hall with a sunlight that I believed existed only in flashbacks. The warm smell of my life sandblasted away my woe and I got back to my real work. I held her tightly, smelled the mess of auburn hair she’d tied up with whatever long, thin object was closest to hand and then proceeded to pull my sharpest knife from the drawer to make us a meal that two hundred years ago would have been considered gauche.
I fell asleep with the TV on mute, her in my arms and the flickering reds, greens, and blues hypnotising me into feeling a certain way about nothing in particular.
“Sorry I’ve been away so long. I’ll come home tonight.” The usual platitudes I spew down the phone knowing full well how childish I’ve been acting. I just had to get away, clear my head. I couldn’t do it myself - you know how these things are.
After that experience I had with The Other Place I was hit with a violent case of sudden onset clairvoyance: I saw everything that was going to happen to me; I saw all the terribly convoluted paths I had to take. I knew that I would have to say yes to horrible things, that I would have to destroy my body just because they’d ask me to. I saw myself in immaculate detail.
I ate bugs with chopsticks and worms with a fork, I drank horse piss lemonade in the backrooms of a packed out bar. They took an MRI of me while I was covered with two hundred rattlesnakes, the sound of it almost drowned out the incessant whispers and murmurs of the cosmic microwave.
After replacing my blood with a substance so thick it barely qualified as a liquid, they gave me everything I ever wanted. I was happy and it suited me. I stopped knowing what was going to happen and started caring again. I holidayed in Italy with a beautifully sun-tanned girl. She took me dancing then moved in ways I thought unimaginable. She told me things that I’d thought only I knew. We drank wine on mountains and tasted fish by the sea. We kissed like wrought iron and then pried ourselves apart to pass homegrown vegetables over handmade everythings.
Our house was tastefully empty and our garden accidentally overgrown.
I passed out at a rooftop bar on my friends 47th birthday and as I was carried out onto the pavement on a really quite comfortable stretcher I started to have visions again. Visions of all the things I can do, and all the faces I can name, and every piece of pub trivia I’ve ever learnt. As the stretcher collapsed into the ambulance I was moved to a laminated chip-board desk in a small but comfortable apartment. I was slightly cold, mostly fine, and my legs hurt with the aches of days well spent.
They put me to work at that desk: write down every uninteresting thing that has ever happened to you. Five months later, sitting there alone, I was left with an untouched pen, a blank white page and a smile on my face that never really went away. The doctors told me that nothing was wrong with me, that I could go home to her and all the stuff we lived amongst. As I slotted my key that I’d cut to look like the skyline of her favourite city into the brass lock of our plain wood door, it swung wide open bathing our hall with a sunlight that I believed existed only in flashbacks. The warm smell of my life sandblasted away my woe and I got back to my real work. I held her tightly, smelled the mess of auburn hair she’d tied up with whatever long, thin object was closest to hand and then proceeded to pull my sharpest knife from the drawer to make us a meal that two hundred years ago would have been considered gauche.
I fell asleep with the TV on mute, her in my arms and the flickering reds, greens, and blues hypnotising me into feeling a certain way about nothing in particular.