a false intro

I don’t believe in dreams. They’re wasted rest, day residue, the unconscious mind sorting between memory, fantasy, and random thought blended incoherently together. Last night’s was particularly exhausting - I was wadding through a high ceilinged hallway, porticoes, colonnades, waist deep in water until gradually the floor dropped out completely, an endless crag. Athletes from all over the world swam by at top speeds, racing towards some invisible finish line.

I was doggy paddling slow through the lane, getting in everyone’s way. My clothes were heavy, weighed down by the water, so breast stroke was not an option. My muscles ached; I must’ve been treading water for a whole year. By the end of it, I couldn’t move my arms or legs at all. I was floundering, gasping for air and taking in water. Carved into the high post and lintel marble above was a message which read:

You Have to Choose & You Have Been Chosen.

Then my arms locked and I started sinking. I woke up. It was raining. It was around noon. I grabbed some weed lying around the house, rolled a spliff and sat at the kitchen table watching lightning strike over the lake. Mist rolled off the water and up the hill toward the house. The rain beat the tin roof at the steady patter of a 250cc outboard motor, an inescapable metallic hum so steady that the longer I sat in it the more it felt like it’s own silence and I forgot what silence even was before this rumble became familiar. I was halfway through my spliff when lightning struck just outside the window in front of me. A

flashbulb explosion went off. It is written that every 600 years Persephone, daughter of Zeus and goddess of harvests Demeter, queen of the underworld, travel’s to earth in a lightning storm. By no reason of logic, magic, luck, destiny or otherwise, I believe that at this very moment in my life, the gravity of my entire being came into contact with the gravitational pull of another cosmic force, altering each of our life pathways from here on out. Though we’d never met and wouldn’t for a few more years, this was the gunshot at the races that started me hurtling towards you. I don’t know why or how, I just know. The crash knocked me to the floor. I got to my knees and peeked out the window. The willow tree behind the house was split in two, right down the middle, smoking. The leaves burned off.

“Well, fuck.”