Maybe what people do is search for beauty in a person until they either give up or find it. If I give up, I leave you. If I find it, I’m done looking? Is that why you’re so lonely? People meet you and have instantly found their beauty… painfully exquisite… search no more… bask in radiance. Does no one make you prove it? … the statement that is written into the delicate curve of your chin? Is that why your friendship thrashed at me in desperation? Did you catch my curiosity trying to look past your eyes? I got THUMPED by what I found. A gaping wound. Ugly. Terrifying. You showed it to me as if to say, “Not everything is beautiful.” Self-Loathing is like Life-Support. It keeps you. (period) ... just this side of death, one forced heartbeat at a time. You're not even really alive unless you can breathe on your own... free from it. But how do you summon the courage to wake up and turn off this thing that breathes for you?

I wanted to hold you and protect you and keep you and I knew that these things would cripple you. I want you to feel the weight of your body on your feet. I want to tell you not to be afraid, but I’d be lying. Be afraid. If you can’t do this, you are ruined. They see pretty, and they can have it. You’re face, to me, is less pretty than it used to be. If your beauty is written there, so is your fear and your hate. I know you. I know your power and your shame, and I know that they are not always different things. If I had my choice, I'd wade through the quagmire of disgusting shit in your life before I'd spend another 5 minutes with your pretty face.

I’m the one who stands in front of you at the drinking fountain and very slowly enjoys every deliciously chilly sip whilst you stand behind me shifting your weight impatiently cuz you’re in a hurry to get back to doing that hopelessly unimportant thing that must be done yesterday or else nothing in particular will happen, which, incidentally, is the very same nothing in particular that will happen if you do get it done, but still you dance and huff and grow more and more irritated by the second and I wonder whether you’re more frustrated that I’m keeping you from your task or that I am enjoying this right now much, much, much more than you EVER will. And maybe you have a point. Because I know how much you need to believe that your actions are important. And maybe they are. They don’t seem to be, but maybe all of the unimportant things that are done by the billions every day add up to something important in the end… don’t they? … please say yes. And maybe that something would be less of whatever it’s supposed to be if you don’t contribute (or at the very least feel like you’re contributing) your part every day.

Yes, yes. This all seems very logical and right and good. But I still can’t bring myself to care. I’m just here for the paycheck… and the delicious water.

I had a dream that I was in prison and had to escape. Which I did. But then I went back. But then I escaped again. The why and the how isn’t nearly as interesting as the who. I was about half a dozen different people in this one. I was the me that was escaping, I was the one that I came back for. I was the guard that caught me slacking on my chores and beat me. I was the motherly figure that guided me out. I think for a second there I was even the dog that was swimming after me. I hid in a cave under some foamy blocky things, and I was the one who found me. It wasn’t until I woke up that I realized that I was also the mean-spirited wing-nut that had a flip comment about me kissing the one I went back for and then proceeded to alert the guard (also me) that I was trying to escape.

(606) is all I remember. She wrote it down on a piece of paper along with a message. I read “I know it’s far away but…” then she turned the paper over and closed the book so that I would read it later… after she left… but I was the one who left… I woke up. I thought you weren’t supposed to be able to read stuff in dreams. I did. I read (606). So where does this dream-girl live? “E Kentucky: area east of Frankfort: Ashland” … or so says the first website that popped up on my *Area Code* Google search.

The dream was shockingly vivid. Her hands were warm and soft on my stomach. Her feet were cold; her toenails sharp. Her breath tickled the hairs on my neck when she talked into my ear. I was smitten. In deep smit. Have you ever had a dream that was so delicious it makes you super-happy-goofy all damn day?

That’s all I have to say about that.