One night you find yourself getting into different trouble than you’re used to. You’re blindly in a car, it’s moving down the freeway faster than you’d like for it to and the windows are all the way down and you can finally stop to look at the streetlights, you can even count how many there are! all because you’re in the passenger seat of a car. You’re scared to get out of the car and that’s really reasonable. I’m not judging. You make the driver of the car stop at a park so you can breathe some fresh air but there’s a police car nearby and now you’re even more scared. There’s a little voice telling you to have fun; it’s your night, it’s your only night. The voice is right, you find yourself reasoning. This is your only night (secretly you think there will be more but I can tell you there won’t be any like that special night that was made for you and you alone). So you go bowling and it’s fun especially when you win. You let the driver of the car stop to get some food; you are just the passenger after all. And it’s all fun and games like the bowling was until you’re facing walls of all sorts. There’s the real wall you climbed over so you could get to the car in the first place. Now it’s suddenly impossible to get over and you need a boost. Getting a boost over the real wall is easy. I won’t bore with a bigger metaphorical wall right now. We have to keep going, we could stop later maybe to think about walls and such.
You sit in your bedroom, quietly of course, trying to do normal things at 4am without making yourself known to the rest of the house. Walls do in fact breathe, one might argue more than the things the walls house, and the walls have caused their fair share of trouble over the years you’ve lived in the perfect little house you’re back in.
You get an orange from the kitchen, you go to the bathroom in the hallway. The brass knob is cold and the texture bothers only the tip of your pinky. You spit your orange seeds one by one into the toilet rather than tossing them in the trash. Nobody really knows what ants like.
When you close your eyes again, you dream like me. You dream that there’s a wad of hair in your mouth which appears suddenly as you’re speaking to someone important. The words you’re saying are important too like the person but now your speech has been overshadowed by the black hairs that cover your tongue and don’t seem to come off like when velcro sticks to itself too well. The person you were talking to is the driver of the car—yes, of course, you’re me now so you instantly recognize who it is. You notice that there’s something disingenuous about talking to him, like you’re sitting in an auditorium of people watching someone speak at you on a screen. That’s exactly what’s happening—there was a man in front of you but now he’s gone. You went into the theatre thinking someone would really be there on the stage, but they aren’t. You’re pretty sure the person missing is the man you just met outside the auditorium. There’s always something separating you from him and it’s sad to you because you can see me from your seat high up in the balcony get excited at the mention of the projector man’s name. The projector car driver man isn’t bad at all. Suddenly you start thinking all of these thoughts. Your tongue turns to velcro again and the hairs come back and you gag as you push your fingers further down your throat to try and remove the hairs. They won’t budge. You need help. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you anyone to get the hairs for you. I probably would have at least thought about doing that. You’ll get used to the uncomfortable feeling of hairs tickling the roof of your mouth. They won’t bother you soon.
You don’t really know how anything starts or ends. It’s a fact. On the screen you get to see lots of cool things people wish they could see as clear as you can. You see swirls and squiggles and pictures of teeth. I think about teeth a lot—I think about their size and shape and the colors they sometimes turn. I wonder a lot what dentists do with teeth their patients don’t want. I’d imagine some dentists eat them and ruin their own teeth so they can get more teeth to eat. The projector car driver man who I know who knows me which now you recognize because you are me makes you worry. His face keeps popping up when there’s breaks in the swirls and squiggles and he’s always smiling. You fall in love with the pictures on the screen, you scoot to the edge of the auditorium chair covered in scratchy red woven polyester. There’s speckles of black in the red. You run over the bumps in the weave with your fingers as you wait in anticipation. He will be back. You fall in love with him just like me. For some reason which I refuse to tell you, this whole ordeal makes you very sad.
Oh.
You’re worried you won’t find someone to love ever again once the projector man goes away. That’s not really why you’re sad. The tiny voice comes back to you now but this time it’s different. There’s a woman siting next to you and her voice isn’t tiny at all. You just couldn’t hear her over the whirring projector. The screen is starting to fade and you can see me packing my bag. I’m not afraid, you are. This feeling won’t bother you soon. It’s okay. The woman tells you that there will be someone to love all the parts of you that sometimes seem like a task to appreciate. You think it’s silly to wait and hope that you find someone who has all the pieces of the projector man that I love. You are confused by me. You miss his patience, the way he’d be excited to talk to you, and you miss sitting across from him at dinner not worrying about how conversations could go dry. Those can’t be your memories though if they’re not entirely mine. I believe that’s how this dream works. You’ve only known the projector screen. You’ve never been to dinner or talked to the man on the screen so how would you know the nuances of this man? I suppose I could tell you but in this dream that’s not part of the plan. The projector man goes away and you cry. There is someone new moving around on the stage. They’re holding the film that you think should be yours to keep. You call out to the moving thing but they don’t hear you. It’s not really your place anyway to try and keep memories I don’t feel like showing again to you tonight. You miss hearing the man’s voice echo through the auditorium. I tell you I miss hearing it as I fall asleep. You like his smile. I have lots of pictures of it.
When you wake up, you think about how nothing really matters much so it’s okay that I don’t know how anything starts or ends. There’s too many things going on that scare you but that’s okay. We aren’t always scared by default like you think. Being scared is a product of the environment we’re in I think. I tell you to go far away on a trip, maybe you should even move away. I don’t say that meanly, I say it with the same impulsiveness I’d use in any other situation involving projectors. You are scared, you should try things to make you more scared so eventually your sensitivity to what is really scary goes away. Don’t be too dangerous though. That’s something I’m worried you’ll do. I just think you have too much of a baseless conviction to stay.
The woman you talked to in the dream whispers to me sometimes too. She tells me that my running and yelling and arguing is pointless. She says that I’m close to everything—the good and the bad—no matter where I go and the thought of that makes me squirm. I want to be far away for just a while and if I want that, you should too. So I pick up your hand and we walk until you’re out of breath. I have to keep going. You haven’t learned to push yourself just yet.
I’m waiting for you to catch up to me, I don’t think you ever will. I’m sorry for the things I showed to you, I whisper quietly through your vague memory of the projector man’s death.
