The Crosswalk in the Middle of REM

I have this dream where I’m a jellyfish. A red one, with the, uh, the fluffy tendrils and such. Slinking around stark against a background of ink and death. Zing, pop. Electric, always, like veins.

I have this other dream, or nightmare, or dare I say waking life, where I’m the unmoored protagonist of all those books that people read in corners of places while drowning in pretentious, incorrectly styled tweed. You know how all of those main characters, by necessity, have a certain disconnect with their environment, their social lives and the people around them. There is a fundamental happening in these stories that requires them to be a level of uninvolved, outside of the know. My god. Foot slightly in the door, straining my ear. The constant thrum, what (the fuck) is going on?

I dream about you as well, a lot. I hate who I am, I hate you. You’d think that would even things out. Alas. I go to bed and everything is complicated.

Behind my eyelids, reflective of some real, tangible situation long forgotten: you spoke and it was the whistle of a firework before exploding, an ice cream machine the crackling of a fire, a turn signal in the middle of the night— the clinking of ice in a glass, screaming on a roller coaster, cicadas and violin and the liberty bell. You opened your mouth and it was like the first time I heard a Whitman poem, you punched the air clean out of me. I make you laugh and it sucks me into space.

I am terrified that I’m going to scrape the bottom of the jar once filled with that thick salty universe, and I will have heaped spoon after spoon to get to the end, the understanding, the dirty nakedness of all that is wrong, all of the chunky time and the sharp teeth and hard pillows—In my dream I rip the peel off of existence, digest the core of my own life, crack the bottom of that stained jar, and under it all at the center of everything is just you.

 
 
Samantha Backlund-Clapp is a student at the University of Amsterdam, writing on napkin scraps in her spare time. The lead on her chain is planted in rural middle America, where she learned the love language of desolate wastelands and dried corn husks. She has been printed in Pinky magazine, Pacific Review, and Dakota Warren’s Nowhere Girl, among others.