A year without a word was coming to an end which I couldn’t see yet. A no-bullshit apocalypse, near enough to forecast the weather for the very last day. The final seconds, ticking away on a watch that had stopped working months ago. Something else, in a place no one had ever bothered to look. Someplace you can only find by accident, standing perfectly still for your life and banging a left.
I hadn’t spent much time wondering whether I was losing my mind, because she was pretty convincing: I’d lost it more than a year ago. You had taken it from me, she said. And I didn’t put up much of a fight, because I wasn’t expecting to go on living. Even if she had been wrong about me, I must have figured: what am I going to do about it? I wasn’t a person anymore. I didn’t have any traits or ideas or a word to offer anyone about anything.
For a long time, I believed she hated me. The way she looked at me seemed a clear-enough indicator, and I could imagine a number of decent reasons why she might: if she blamed me for what you’d done, or if she just saw me as a product of your madness, left to burden and haunt her. Either would have been fair, and neither required much pondering to seem plausible. It was only once I finally stopped feeling sorry for myself that I realized it had nothing to do with me.
In her bedroom, in the instant she knocked my left light out, I saw what she had seen but couldn’t admit:
Some doing, is all it takes. A little dying, a diet of lying, and wordless abandon to the strands of thin light playing against the glass. Medicine to begin and end another one night sanguine stand in the sunkissed sand. Manual time, borrowed from a terribly broken watch. A certain number of steps and the grand secret of seductive grief.
Then the process complexifies and tends to vary, night-to-night. Last night, it was a sort of retrocausally prophetic stage play, my own shadow portraying young death himself. The day prior had been deliberately drenched in whiskey, too much, but enough to mine a well-founded fear and its accompanying abject terror. I was still in the late-stage dry blitz, slightly dizzy, and made much worse with my newly minted nightmare laid bare. Then the light ceased dancing and the room ceased to be.
“That’s really sweet,” says one patient to the other, “but the second you fall in love, a fate worse than death is on the table. I’m not wrong.”
The basis of the current application is adaptation.
I first made note of Dali’s method in 2017, but it never appeared to be practically useful until I came home and started digging through websites instead of books.
In a windowless room yesterday, a nearly pristine green notebook opened for the first time in seven years.
What’s your favorite memory which you’re not certain was real?
Who cares for the person you care for most, as much as you do?
Has anyone ever broken your heart without knowing your name?
When did you last look into the mirror and see something beautiful looking back?
Would you see something impossible if you looked behind you right now?
What’s the last dream to make you feel bad in a way you couldn’t understand?
What’s the idea you had? You know the one.
Is there anything you love so much that you never need to think about it?
When you laugh so hard that your eyes close, what color do you see?