Sleep Well Juliet
Sorry I’ve been away so long. I’ll come home tonight. 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’ and I was violently hit with a 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, and worms, and drank horse piss lemonade. It was awful. They took an MRI of me as I was covered with 200 rattlesnakes, the sound of it just about drowned out the incessant whispers and murmurs of the cosmic microwave.
After replacing my blood with a substance so thick it just about 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 I started caring again. I holidayed in Italy with a beautifully sun-tanned girl and then she took me dancing. She moved in ways I thought unimaginable and told me things that I thought only I knew. We drank wine on mountains and tasted fish by the sea. We kissed like wrought iron and passed 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 a little with the aches of days well spent. They put me to work at that desk and told me to write down every uninteresting thing that ever happened to me. After 5 months of 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 that I 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 vestibule with a sunlight that I believed only existed in flashbacks. The warm smell of my life sandblasted all my woe away 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 and make us a meal that 200 years ago would have been considered gauche. I fell asleep with the TV on mute, her in my arms and the flickering red, greens and blues hypnotising me into feeling a certain way about nothing in particular.
After replacing my blood with a substance so thick it just about 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 I started caring again. I holidayed in Italy with a beautifully sun-tanned girl and then she took me dancing. She moved in ways I thought unimaginable and told me things that I thought only I knew. We drank wine on mountains and tasted fish by the sea. We kissed like wrought iron and passed 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 a little with the aches of days well spent. They put me to work at that desk and told me to write down every uninteresting thing that ever happened to me. After 5 months of 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 that I 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 vestibule with a sunlight that I believed only existed in flashbacks. The warm smell of my life sandblasted all my woe away 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 and make us a meal that 200 years ago would have been considered gauche. I fell asleep with the TV on mute, her in my arms and the flickering red, greens and blues hypnotising me into feeling a certain way about nothing in particular.