from the Sheets of a Sleepwalker

The dreams that you remember well began not in the mind but in the heart. These dreams, synthesized with the soul of another person, gave birth to worlds that you also carried in your heart.

In this dream you wanted to stay forever. You wanted to lose all of yourself, and live only by feeling.

With every step I touch, your spirit accumulates; with every step I leave, your dream is finished. The trail of organs spells a fairy tale I once heard. In the glow of the planets your story becomes real.

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All of a sudden, he noticed that his beauty had fallen all apart on him, that it had begun to pain him physically like a tumor or a cancer. He still remembered the weight of the privilege he had borne over his body during recent, earlier days, which he had dropped now-- who knows where? or even more questionable, how?-- with the weariness of resignation, with the final gesture of a declining creature. It was impossible to bear that burden any longer. He had to drop that useless attribute of his personality somewhere; as he turned a corner, somewhere in the outskirts of that chaotic forest. Or left it behind laying at the feet of one of them dead trees like some old, useless toy from his childhood that he had outgrown. He was tired of being the center of attention, of being under siege from both girls' and guys' long looks. At night, when insomnia stuck its pins into his eyes, he would have liked to be an ordinary guy, without any special attraction. Everything was hostile to him within the four walls of his room. Desperate, he could feel his vigil spreading out under his skin, into his head, pushing the temperature further towards the roots of his hair. It was as if his arteries had become peopled with hot, tiny insects who, with the approach of dawn, awoke each day and ran about on their moving feet in a rending subcutaneous adventure in that place of clay made fruit where his anatomical beauty had found its home. In vain, he struggled to chase those horrible creatures away. He couldn't. They were part of his organism. They'd been there, alive, since much before his physical existence. They came from the heart of his father... who had fed them painfully during his nights of desperate solitude. They'd pour into his arteries through the cord that linked him to his mother ever since the beginning of the world. There was no doubt that them insects had not been born spontaneously into his body. But it was necessary, urgent, to put a stop to that heritage. Someone must renounce the eternal transmission of that artificial beauty. It was no longer beauty, It was a sickness that had to be halted, that had to be cut off in some bold and radical way.

It was during his hours of wakefulness that he remembered the things disagreeable to his fine sensibility. He remembered the objects that made up the sentimental universe where, as in a chemical stew, those microbes of despair had been cultivated. During those nights, with his blue, round eyes open and frightened, he bore the weight of the darkness that fell upon his temples like molten lead. Everything was asleep around him. And from his corner, in order to bring to sleep, he tried to go back over his memories.

But that remembering always ended with a terror of the unknown. Always, after wandering through the dark corners of the forest, his thought would find themselves face to face with fear. Then, the struggle would begin. The struggle against two unmovable enemies-- his own demons, and those of the cursed wild. The first, he left wrestling with his sleepless sheets, hidden beneath the four legs of his bed. While the latter seemed to be the ones clawing at him the most during the day. And so, He lay there in perplexed anxiety of what was to come in place of the merciless dark. Somehow, he found solace and saw refuge in his dilemma: stuck in the realm after sleep but before dreams, that moment after dark but before the day. In his vertigo, he whispered to the wind and hoped for it to be carried to Divine heights. He prayed for time, to once be on his side. Please, he almost cried, just up and die!

Outside, he felt the earth coming into labor. In a heartbeat, it would have given birth to a new day. He rolled over to his side and folded his head into his pillow wishing to drown out the distant sound of hooves and of hissing and the growing flutter of razor wings that would cut right through his throat and to his spirit. Outside, the early dew gave off a pungent smell- the kind that u could smell not with your nostrils but with your stomach. He held his breath, waiting in dire desperation with the weak flicker of hope that his pray'r be answered. His stomach grew into knots, a clear-cut sign that the night breeze failed to trade his hopes for the night fairies' benediction. He got out of bed and dragged his weak legs across the room, towards the door. He stood in the doorway and tugged his muscles in every direction possible to rid them of their silly exhaustion. He rubbed his eyes and went on his way across the field, to his sole place of comfort and security. Upon reaching it, he smiled in gratitude for its faithfulness. He went around it once before laying beneath its nurturing leaves and attentive branches. He arranged his now-secured limbs into a fetal position in between its great roots and felt its trunk give off a warmth that wrapped him in a soft film.

Only then did he realize the foolishness of his fears.