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The city is a place most everyone moves once in their lives.
What everyone is searching for
is very personal,
significant,
different.
I was searching.
I didn't do much thinking about where I was going.
I just needed to move forward
a feeling of motion.
I noticed that people are very efficient in the city.
To think that
most inhabitants came from somewhere else,
probably a wide open place.
How did they learn to be so efficient?
Where do we learn this?
Is it learned?
Is it instinct?
I can move,
blind from one end of the station to the other.
Not a single person so much as brushes my sleeve.
The space we move through
is so delicate,
so precise.
Efficiency is survival in the city.
All this chaos is a necessity.
Chaos it seems close up.
From afar the disorder forms a gigantic sphere of order.
I found my place in the city.
I worked.
I went home.
Is this my place?
Why do I get up every day and do this all over again?
Is there an end?
A place we get to and know that we are finished?
I often think about a philosophy of ego,
the belief when I leave a room
imagining all the activity left behind stopping.
The people in the room freeze like statues
waiting to come alive when I re-enter.
This thought that all reality is perceived,
a play that revolves around in my mind,
frightens me.
This makes me
feel alone.
If reality is perceived
what effect can two people have upon another?
If our realities are based only in our minds
we would have absolutely no effect on one another.
We would only be significant only to ourselves.
We would be truly alone.
My brother died before I came to the city.
I had not seen Jim in the two years before his death.
My brother wrote his thoughts in a journal.
I wonder
Jim’s state of mind as he sat in the cafe
writing the last entry in his journal?
Jim did not see the taxi cab approach.
The only witness to the accident
Ina,
a stranger on the other side of the street,
turned the moments before the taxi struck.
The accident happens so fast,
so surgically,
at first Jim denied the taxi’s blow.
It was all that Ina could do was to comfort Jim
in the moments he had left.
Jim gave Ina his journal.
Jim laid with Ina for a few more minutes before he died.
I often dreamt of my brother.
Dreams so powerful I could not get back to sleep.
Afterwards I went for long walks into the night.
I knew the place where Jim died.
Sometimes I walked near this place
but I never went too close.
I knew of my brother’s last journal.
I knew of Ina,
the stranger that last held Jim before he died.
I knew Jim’s last words were waiting for me to read.
I hesitated meeting Ina,
but my dreams prevailed.
She was sitting waiting for me in the café,
a cup of coffee-the journal set neatly before her.
She was neither waiting in anticipation for my arrival
nor completely relaxed.
A clean crisp flavor in the air
surrounded Ina sitting solemn and smiling softly.
The warmness of the coffee
the awakening smell in the air,
reviving,
stimulation of thoughts reborn and reformed anew.
I was captivated by Ina.
Her world was relaxed and tranquil,
every moment essential.
Time was not so important here.
I picked up the journal for the first time.
I recognized the boyish writing of my older brother.
Jim’s voice was in every curve, in every letter.
My world began to make more sense,
not because things became clearer,
only because I began to think less.
I consumed the pages of Jim’s journal.
Jim’s journal covered the last four months of his life.
As I read further I wondered about Jim’s voice.
Who was he writing the journal to?
It was as if my brother unconsciously realized that
all the passages were written to another person.
Perhaps this was to himself some years later.
Jim was letting me into his life.
Each day revealed a little more to me
his state of mind,
his dreams,
his fears.
Strange
that I am getting to know Jim like I never had before
and he is gone.
It was after I begin reading the journal
that the subway dreams began.
Ina became more and more a presence in my life.
The simple elegance of being with Ina,
a pleasure I have never understood
or it has been too long.
I think back to myself as a boy.
Fourteen falling for a girl unable to control my emotions,
not because my emotions are uncontrollable,
but because I am feeling them for the first time.
My stomach turns, aches,
feeling agony of a close death
if this girl would slip away.
Exhilaration that she is close enough,
reacting to my voice.
Her eyes looking me over in a similar way.
It seemed every time I closed my eyes
I returned to the subway.
What kind of dream is this?
Everything is in it's place,
moving and working unlike any dream I have had.
In a dream all the elements seem to be reacting to me,
waiting to come alive as soon as I enter the scene.
This is different.
Jim?
My brother dead as I know him before my eyes.
I did not know how to react.
I regained my composure and followed only at a safe distance.
Thoughts raced in my mind of what to say.
Our life together flashed before me.
I could not follow my brother any longer.
I had to leave the dream immediately.
When I was young I often had lucid dreams.
As I grew older I lost the ability to use my dreams
but now I was remembering.
In Ina’s eyes I saw myself,
not like a mirror,
more than just an exact reflection.
Is this a dream?
I waited for the dream to end.
I realized that the dream wasn’t going to end
if I didn’t want it to.
The journal became a blueprint of this other world.
It was not necessarily a script but more like a guide.
A setting but not the actions.
I developed tricks to tell whether or not I was in a dream.
There was always something there to give it away.
I spent the whole night riding to different stops
wherever I came up Jim was there.
Sometimes I just watched to see what Jim would do.
Sometimes I spoke with him.
My life for the next few weeks became a dual life.
One in the waking hours with Ina
and the other
exploring the dream world of Jim as I slept.
Each day as the clarity of my dreamworld sharpened
my perception of life became more unclear.
My world became a blur.
Am I sleeping?
Am I awake?
The 3rd of January,
my brother’s death.
A date I have never visited.
The madness,
the madness
the power to be able to navigate a labyrinth of a person’s life.
As the weeks went on I remembered less and less of the real world.
Ina tried to reach me,
but I was gone.
Until one day
I realized
all I was living were my dreams.
I became stuck inside my dreams.
I had been everywhere,
seen all there is to see.
My permanent dreamworld was one step moved from reality,
one shade off,
one moment moving to the next.
Not like in reality,
but fading into one another like cuts in a movie.
If there was a door to leave I would take it.
A subway train to bring me back to reality,
to Ina,
I would ride it.
I had lost track of time since I last saw Ina’s face.
Weeks?
Months?
Now Ina appeared before me.
Ina was my last hope to pull myself out of these dreams,
to return myself to reality.
Is this a dream?
Have I gone back into reality?
What is my reality?
I think about the room,
frozen,
waiting.
Are those people waiting to come alive
or is it me waiting?
I realized at that moment,
my brother’s fate
and my fate.
I thought carefully.
There were images passing through my mind.
Images of people throughout my life.
Was I prepared to leave these dreams?
And move onto the next place?
As I thought more, my mind has more clarity.
Ina
Ina
Ina
I stared into Ina’s eyes.
Ina looked upon me as a total stranger,
caring
but unknowing.
and I looked upon Ina
knowing I love her.