rinse & repeat

today i woke up thinking i had a violent dream. a fleeting thought, leaving and reentering my body. the sleep is rinsing, and the waking is repeating. i live in a body that is mine but in the days that are not mine to take care of things inside a pink screen that is not about me. and i don’t know if this will ever amount to anything. i don’t think it ever will.

i shower with a broken showerhead, asking why every shower i have is broken, and sometimes it convinces me that i could write about my plight. violence leaves and reenters my body when i wash it. i stare at the mirror and it told me i might be innocent if i wash my face. i wash it. i rinse it. not in the proper way, because i need to repeat what the mirror tells me to do every single day. you just need to wash your face.

.

i touched her and remembered that in my dream was a thing from twelve years ago, buried in an unspoken agreement between me and the odd helix that is my blueprint. the stench. the rot. I hope it decomposes in the worst way possible. unrefined, it waits for me to finish washing my dishes, for me to run out of patience. for me to reach my breaking point.

i wish it had gone, yet we carry its carcass everywhere we go. it called out to me, a sick infant a hundred times my size, begging for me to release it. the others do not hear it calling and i dig a deeper hole. in my dreams the thing rattled in its cage, broke its chain, and metamorphosed.

.

i remember what makes convoluted things unique. it is the fixation. i do not think i am unique, but i picture myself—a portrait of violence, washing its hands, pretending it never had lapses of judgment. a sane person, only with fixations.

.

she sure did cry twelve years ago but i am not sure if she would cry in the present. i push her away whenever my feet are wet and whenever the way she breathes sounded like violence. i do not know what she thinks of me when i refuse her. a coup, a betrayal, perhaps.

.

violence.

i threw him with all his twisted wants down the cliff. i stabbed him over and over, and i did not know if he would ever allow me to think about violence. he shrieked and fought and touched the nerves that should have forgiven him. i dragged his body through spiky stones and the textured asphalt they built for us because i wanted him to bleed dry from his lacerations. poison. i wanted his body to betray him. gasoline. i wanted him to burn slowly. rope. i wanted him to bruise.

violence.

and i would cut his body with invisible strings so his flesh would flow away in jagged pieces and his blood would go down the drain, but he would rise up again, my nightmare, and i could never get rid of him. and i pulverized his body once again. they were watching me but they could never stop me. and i would retreat to my chamber to rinse my hands. repeat. rinse. a set of invisible strings. poison, gasoline, rope. repeat. rinse. repeat.

.

he said he had always waited for me. i did not like it when he said that. i did not want to be here to save him from his plight. i wish i am not here. i feel my heart would break in a thousand pieces if she had waited for me to save her, too.

articulating my thoughts meant acknowledging my violence, little by little, and i feel something crack in me.

.

i woke up, thinking that i did not have a violent dream. she told me that i laugh in my sleep.