pipe dreams; the flushing

[pulcinellagawain]

Last night, I had a vivid dream of myself clambering through and descending into the many layers of that fabled building that counts the human phases of growth by rooms and pays tribute to significance with postmodern symbolism - the museum of time. The dream came in two parts, or rather, from two perspectives. One was myself, viewing the world through my own eyes, and the other was some form of remote viewing, a fly on the wall angle that beheld a woman in the bottommost level of the many layers stacked atop each other, wedged below the earth into dirt as an ant colony. I was drifting into sleep when my mind slipped into an omniscient viewing of her, and immediately, without seeing her face, I knew that she was my best friend and she was inconsolably depressed. She slouched at a painstaking pace through the first room in this temporal network, although it was not a room at all. It was a forest, the very forest that I had grown up in. I hazarded that she may have been katherine, my best friend growing up, who kept me company as the only other girl amongst the gaggle of boys we were raised with. She trudged at a snail's pace through the translucent memories of fort building and playful imaginations, her hair shrouding her face and bowed in an unrecognizable homage to cousin it. I not only knew that she was very dear to me, but that she was close to suicide, and by the time she had walked through the bottom level and the furthermost room, (which, quite frankly at her pace was still going to take a while.) she was going to kill herself.
Incentivized by this knowledge, I sealed drowsy eyes shut with the glue of reverie and let myself plunge downwards into deep sleep, repelling through darkness as lara croft and landing in the surface level of subconscious creation. The first level was a vast shopping mall, with ghosts of conversations meandering and referring to maps in order to locate an escalator, but there were none. Apparently I was aware of this fact, because I immediately began pulling from my backpack climbing gear and slipped into waders. Unfortunately, the only way to descend through the complex, was through the sewage and lavatory facilities. The only blessing was that the building was long defunct, with it’s bathrooms out of use for many years, so the sewage had decayed into green sludge without an overpowering odor, but the dank of decaying fecal matter still lingered, permeated into the slimy pipes and crawl spaces. With my mouth pressed into a hard line, gritted in determination, I kicked past an out of order sign, lifted up the toilet seat and began to climb down through the hole of expired filth.
My perception continued to flicker back and forth between my own and the narrative landscape that watched my friend meander through the rooms of all my memories, compressed into singular exhibits with glass encasing a sum total of meaningful representation. The first space containing the forest gave way to a door and she glumly entered without looking up. The next room was the lobby to a movie theater, complete with spilled popcorn scattered and smashed into the carpet. I descended and watched, following above her as a camera crew, through the theater and into the first real exhibit, an empty space with bland carpet containing a single glass case, wherein were placed a strange assortment of animal bones, arrowheads, a refracting telescope, crumpled up paper, lawn clippings, a wooden case filled with cotton balls, gum wrappers, and some change. Even the air in the small and angular room had the scent of the warm familiarity that is earned by history. I descended, and she continued to shuffle on to the last room. Her steady scuffle became scraping, as the hallway between the room of quizzical notions and this one steadily narrowed, every surface of the passageway slanted and narrowed as a magnifying glass into a focal point of the sun. her listless trudging gradually became stooped until eventually she was crawling on her hands and knees, sliding herself along at the same exasperating pace. At the end of this funhouse tunnel was a cabinet sized door that she tumbled through with a dull thump, landing in a cozy little closet with a warm light, whose glow shone softly upon the pine and cedar walls and they emitted the scent of sunny citrus. The carpet was brand new and bounced with the firm pliability of cushion, and scattered upon it were magazines and several different styles of brassiere. For the first time, she ceased the infernal death march, and sat cross legged upon the floor, flipping disinterestedly through a clothing catalog. This is where, at last, I emerged from the winding shaft of feculence, gasping, and pulled myself up through the toilet hole belonging to the bottom most level. I wiped the miring grime from my face, leaving a smudge of green residue in it’s place, and sauntered to throw open the door to her snug little suite, where I lowered myself noisily in to sit beside her, leaving a snails trail of putrefaction smeared behind my every movement. She began to recount everything that had happened to her, and although the details of the conversation blended into a buzzing ambience of muffled voices that fill an expanding space of recollection, I sat in a mollified silence that captured the gravity and horror of each trauma she related. After some time, she concluded the vast list of harm that had been done to her and we both were enveloped in a thick silence, ringing with grief. After a moment, I extricated myself upwards with the same grace and sound effects as a filing cabinet, and crouching, I turned to face her, and said,
“Lady, I really could give a fuck. This is a dream, and currently the greatest parts of my brain are rendering literal sewage that I just crawled through. Youre coming with me. “
And then I woke up.

“Running away, I'm running away
Cupid ain't shit throw the gun in my way
Bullets spit in my face, tears fall from the sky
What a beautiful frown it has kept me alive
Seeking for an answer but I feel like I'm far
Runaway bitch with a rebellious heart
What a dangerous game, hope you walk out now
'Cause love is a bitch and she talks out loud
Wish I was the type to maybe open my heart
Said it from the start shit it's cold and it's dark
So what, lust me or lust me not
Fuck trust and feelings, I trust my glock”