Basilisk Floods and Houses

               This has to be a short post, though there are 6,785 more notable and longer posts I should right. Well, perhaps there are just a few, but they’re great ones. They are so great they deserve more than a hackneyed burp of text. Last night’s dream on the other hand was just pathetic enough to merit a big bubble of swallowed air. I will skip the odd details—like the mysterious black owls that rose from the water, about three feet high, and then opened their mouths to spew snakes and slugs. They were, in the dream, modern basilisks. But that was the strange part.

The night before last, I had been wandering the street killing time after work and before people were available. Thirteen hour days are eating at me. They keep me pleasantly distracted, busying my mind the way school used to tired me from heartache. AroundUnion Square, a lithe light-skinned black woman with curls that fell around her forehead, bounced onto the sidewalk from the open doors of a restaurant.

               “Are you having a good night?” She asked.

               “Alright. You?”

               “I am having a great night! Inside is my girlfriend as she is incredible. I think I am going to marry her.”

               “That’s awesome.” I tell her. And I mean it. It makes me feel good to see someone so happy—to see themselves with someone, rolling in the fabulousness of someone who makes you feel awe. “Really wonderful.”

               Then she looks at me. “I’m going to marry her, but I think you are beautiful.”

               Of course it makes me feel good. I feel invisible most days, watching other people fumble through relationships, titter into love, and breeze through one another light and temporary as soap bubbles.

                It must have meant a lot. These small incidental compliments said for the sheer joy, mean a lot. They are some love child of Gift and Worship. Does god exist without a church? And aren’t we all trying to mean something?  Aren’t we all trying to get the unknowable parts of ourselves to coalesce into something palpable and immortal?  So, there is  little bit of love in the compliment given unsolicited and without expectation of return.

               Two block earlier, a well-dressed frattish guy had yelled at me, “Hey. Come here.”  

               Shockingly, his seductive love-cries did not work. But he was persistent. He yelled again, “You don’t have to be such a bitch.” Immediately, I realized the weight of my loss. Luckily, my bed will no longer be empty. I will lay alone and fill my bed with tears of regret over this missed love.

It makes sense that the dream came after that night. In the dream, I had a very serious girlfriend. And she was wonderful. She even won over my mother, which was the really surreal part. We were supposed to get married, which is when the strange things happened like the giant basilisk owls that vomited creepy crawlies. The more she loved me, the worse things got. In the midst of it all, I would notice things about her—a tattoo I had never noticed in our years together, though it covered most of her back, and which I did not like on discovering it. I did not like the shape of her thighs. I noticed the shape of her teeth. And the world grew ugly with my pettiness. But, underneath it all, I knew that the cause was the falseness. She loved me. I could not love her. I felt empty and dark. There was nothing, but her ardent devotion to show me how godless I was. As the dream continued, she was the only beautiful thing in the world, but the darkness swallowed everything else. The seas grew black and began to swallow the small town where we lived. The rains pummeled the shopping malls, soaked the suburban families, and the streets emptied.

                It was my darkness, storming over the world and destroying everything. Godless, I stirred evil into the sea. In the dream, it was the disingenuousness that created a profound lie and interior hatred. It could not be contained. It came around us, but she still protected me. Part of me hated her. She made me feel how lonely I was. It was an awful conundrum.

                In the morning, I awoke aching. By the8:00PMstrategy meeting, the Caesar salad seemed limper than an hour should allow. The voices seemed to drone. I drew little houses with couches in front of fireplaces, surrounded by books. Scribbling, I made big puffy clouds and round attic windows where old sentimental treasures would be. I drew traveling houses and houses in fields. And around the paper, I drew hearts and remembered how to write the names I have forbade my self.