Have you ever fallen into one of those dreams? Where you feel as though you’re a drifter whose feet falter within someone else’s substance. Uncovering gray notions, and flimsy remnants that have manifested in the most unsightly of structures. Knee deep in dirt, and mildly victim to the slight, insistent tap of a heartbeat. Slowing down, easy, and calculating. Forthwith you’re submerged, swallowed by a large body of water, with it’s featureless face severely swelling, upsetting a surge of ugly aspects that advance weeping, and stammering, just before bursting waterworks of loss, and regain. Passively you swim on, until all you can hear is the distant piping shriek. All at once, the air becomes quiet. All that is unfamiliar has began pursuing you. Disguised, and grimacing, alarmingly confiding secrets in your voice, with your words. There appears to be hundreds of them, climbing one before the other. You begin to peel off the layers, masks, upon masks. Only to find that strangers, have become all the more strange. Now you’re sinking before yourself, and just before drowning, you realize where you are. Carefully placing your fingers on the surface, observing as the ripples radiate, and dissipate, quietly back into themselves.
If you have, well then you simply must know that you do not necessarily need to see the writings on the walls, or anywhere else for that matter. Despite that alternative I felt compelled to pass on this message to you, engage in one more approach, and perhaps hinder the inevitable plunge. In spite of the undying fear, my everlasting insecurity, that any letter I write should fall short, and fail to reach you as originally intended. It’s a diligent tightrope act you see, each passing hour, ink or less.
I write to you at every chance I get, moving along the fog of every cold glass surface, breathing a new layer when I fall short of space. I write to you in my thoughts, at any station, where waiting is just spare time to revel in the words. I write to you in each joke I tell my neighbors, and of course in all directions that I pass on to strangers. Each unusual idea, each forgotten face, unappreciated moment, each lie without a trace. Most of all I write to you in the dark, on seemingly empty walls with my fingertips, beneath cold sheets when my eyes refuse to drop the curtains. Inkless, I can still make out the characters the following morning. Awkward, and somewhat ugly. When I grow weary of the scatter, I simply brush over it with my palm, and begin once more. Often times my thoughts fail to make it to paper. Why would they when they have such spacious, impalpable places on the walls, and everywhere else. To write for you I dig into my skin, and wait for the words as close to perfect as imaginable, to heal, and form a new layer. So that I may start, and start again. It used to be that the objective was getting as much on paper for you as possible, so that you should not have to miss a thing. It’s as if I was trying to piece it all together, so that you would have a safe place to fall into, so that together, one day perhaps we could look back and swim in all that we know so far. Although the benefit has long since been the thought process, spending as much time in the idea as possible. Finding the closest sound, the slightest vibration that could perhaps express all that it is we see before us. It is the journey, and not the destination. El tarik tawil. Always I am writing to you, from embryo to eldest, my thoughts a vale of expanding images, in search of their words. I don’t know how long I will be in each idea, but I will leave the traces, scatter the pieces across the aging walls.
