There was a dream that I shared with a conspirator who once believed with me that, despite the obstacles and noise of the modern world, we could hold it together and give it a home in the real world.
Expired passport statuses, money and airplanes separated me from my co-conspirator and the dream that we once held together was now stretched across the Atlantic Ocean and where once it felt like a thing made out of steel it became a thing that was made out of smoke.
At the time I was a hustler, a town to town vagabond with nary a penny to my name. The things that it would take to make this dream a reality were many and unattainable. Namely money and time.
I gave up on the dream to be inside of my head with the memories it left me which I could nurture and adore without incurring the wraith and destructive potential of the real world. A part of me thought that she would hold on to this dream forever.
Slowly I came to the conclusion that there would never come another dream like the one that we had shared together, but it was too late.
When I contacted my co-conspirator through wires and electronic signals I came to find out that she had given up her end too.
Frantic with the intensity of the realizations that occurred I counted the pieces of this broken thing and I began to glue it all together again.
Despite the warnings from friends and family that I was crazy to hold on to this silly thing… despite the soft sound of her words telling me everything except to give it up… I decided that I would not stop pretending that this crazy thing which was still to me so beautiful was not over.
I set myself to the task post haste of figuring out all of the problems that stalled our plans in the beginning. First there was the issue of money, which neither of us had or have.
I made an account and it became a promise that all of the dollars that I could make that did not go into my mouth or roof would go into this account. There were tickets that would need to be purchased, food to be eaten, drugs to be consumed… water bills for the eternal bath we would take… these things have to be accounted for.
The next issue was time. She wanted to see the vast expanse of land that had raised me into the whisp of a person that I was. All of it.
I figured out how to buy a small home which we could tote around with us. I did the unfun work of coming up with some realistic plan on where all that money would come from. I waited and I waited for a Golden Ticket from the military which would fund the entire venture.
These solutions have yet to pass, but where before there was only confusion and desperation, now there is a clear chain of events that must happen and I have them all mapped out on a piece of paper that I keep safer than any other paper. This is my map back to the dream.
When I talked to her, excited to share with a mad scientists zeal how I had figured out how our dream would work she looked at me from five thousand miles away with pity. She did not want it anymore.
So what was I to do? Give it up, throw away the map and key and move on with my life into a dreamless void of pre-plotted beer sex which turns quickly into lonesome fucks in dirty beds, still with the memory of her face so near the surface of my mind. A memory face which refuses to be pushed back into the ehter of my mind.
Fuck that.
I will not take the chance that some day she will come to her senses and realize that neither of us will be able to find anything as pure as what we had and I will have to turn her away because there are complications in the way. Other lovers, poverty, insanity.
I will dig a trench around my dream with a mote that will only be lowered for one and I will sit inside of the fort that I have built around it in my head and tell it and myself that some day she will come back. I’ll fill the fort with money and a mobile home from which we could see the world and I’m going to wait this time of uncertainty out.
She doesn’t think that I will do it and neither does anyone else. Most people think that I am incapable of doing this. A very large part of me knows precisely how insane all of this is… but I have to try. I don’t mean “have to” in any way short of simply being incapable of not doing it.
We talk every day now and I make my intentions clear. She tells me that she has a dark side and that all relationships are fucked in the end and there is a kind of truth to what she says but I know her dark side even if she thinks I don’t. What she says about relationships is a reality that everyone must face if they don’t want to spend their lives alone and it is only fatal to relationships involving lazy people.
It may come to pass that these words will seem very foolish in the future and that I am only setting myself up for a great deal of pain… part of me is expecting this. The other part, my gambling half, doesn’t give a fuck.
I will take the probability of pain for the slim odds of having the only thing I want again. That is the decision that I am making. The rest is up to time and a girl who loved me unlike any other person had before.
The Paper Trail 