Sydney - Part Two Point One

Jesus... And it seems I had just sunk into it. The dead awaken again in such a familiar way.

I’m torn up and out of sleep, gasping. My respiratory tract on fire with the friction of breath forced rapidly through constricting airways. Asphyxiating on churning surges of hot, stale air and anxiety. My eyes fly across the room, desperate to make sense of shapes and shadows. My pen and an open notebook cling to the heat on my bare chest.

It’s okay. You’re still here.

I purge the panic in one heavy and heaving exhalation, and crack a slight smile. Something I usually haven’t been able to do so easily before in such episodes. There is solace garnered in the aforementioned thought. The tension drains from my shoulders, my elbows fold, and my head falls back to be joined with my sweaty pillow once again. I wipe the sticky away from my eyes.

These Fuckers followed me down here?

I think about the dream.

Fuck that noise...

It’s 1475 Hornblend. I’m back inside those four walls that saw the majority of my last four years outside of that goddamned studio. I miss them a bit now as I write this. They were tall and painted Swiss Coffee, though they tended to wear shades of their own that did well to mirror the moods. On days and nights the door in that room saw pleasant traffic, those walls were brightly lacquered with laughter and love. On days and nights it didn’t, they tended to suit themselves in shades of silver and gray. And in all of them combined, those walls harbored an abundance of my happiest and most horrific hours. Triumphant build-ups, brutal breakdowns, nights of endless laughter with friends like family, streams of tears, bottles and beers, profuse drug abuse, far too many sleepless nights, far too many nightmares, far too many dreams unmet with fruition, a lot of beautiful songs, and a few beautiful women.

But I digress...

How considerate of some of them to come and join me here.

I sit angled to the left in a red chair against the wall by my computer. A pivot point in a circle of family and friends. Nate. Wolfe. Natalie. Georgia and Jordan sit on my bed. Andy stands in the background with a nail gun and roofing, constructing what looks like a house. My father sits in a chair to the left of me, my brother to the right. Their presence commands my attention. My mouth is a broken sieve, spilling a muddle of syllables saturated with exuberance. I’m emphatically trying to describe in detail every inch of this magnificent place, and how happy I am, but the task is baffling. The ideas are fluid, and the words follow suit as they merely spill out and onto the floor. It’s okay though, they understand. They can see the joviality I wear just above my jawline. Until spontaneously, I make sense of syntax.

“Shane, you would fucking love it here! We’ve got to check out the bridge when we get back to Sydney tomorrow.”

It’s then that something clicks, and I realize where I am again. My brother’s face goes stone cold, my father shakes his head slowly, and the room darkens.

Oh my god... I’m not going back, I fucked it up and I’m home already... Oh, fuck!

At my revelation, the circle begins to stand, and make a line for the door. Jordan is the first to her feet. A rictus of disgust raked across her face. Her eyes, hollow, black holes, crushing space behind my ribs. She exits without a word.

Shit.

Georgia stands with the waterworks welling in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry”, she whispers. Her hand slides softly beneath the contour of my jaw, slightly lifting my face to meet her descending eyes.

She begins to walk out. The rest in the back are gathering the last of their things and making their way to oblivion.

“Fuck! Wait!”

Are the last two words I construct with competence. I jump up and try to plead, but what were once words flowing out of my mouth have become sand, and it’s trapped my tongue. It’s coming faster and faster and dumping at my feet. I bite down to try and stop it, but my teeth crunch and crumble as they come down. The pouring sand becomes streaked with blood as it begins to shred gums and nerves that once held teeth, and bury the floor beneath me. It chews the tools I’d use to sound desperate screams as it passes, and leaves me choking. I look to my father and brother, the last two who remain sitting while the others exit. My brother speaks first, with the cadence of a character whose expectations were well met. He smiles a bit and shrugs.

“It’s okay, man. You fuck up.”

He stands, steps around the mound of strawberry now engulfing my knees, and makes for oblivion.

Fuck...

The door slams as he leaves, and I see those still grey walls shatter into never ending cascades of sand. They are rushing downwards, and beginning to swallow the room from the outside, in. It’s collecting at my guts now. Tentacles take shape from rising plumes of dust to whip about my face and sting my eyes.

You’ve got to be shitting me...

I raise my eyes to my father once again. He sits calmly in his chair. His left foot draped over his right knee. Elbows on the armrests, boney bases of a tower pinnacled at five points by ten fingers pressed firmly together. His eyes fixed on the fiasco that is my circumstance. He seems to be the only thing held together at this point, while all the rest comes tumbling down. A deluge of disappointment damming behind his concrete visage, merely calculating a point at which to open up, and further flood this joint with utmost effectiveness. A disposition to which he seems well accustomed.

How familiar. A fucking commandant of confidence amongst the chaos, ready to eloquently offer a swift and serrated opinion on my plight...

My efforts only drop and dissipate into dust on their way to his ears.

A disposition to which I am well accustomed.

I try to rally, and brace myself for those flood gates to open.

Stop being such a pussy, you sand sacked, sad sack... Lift ‘em and grab em. Let’s fucking hear it...

But it doesn’t come. No deluge of disappointment. No lecture on letdown. No fucking, trite address on my much needed reform. And it’s what comes instead, I think, which terrifies the most.

Still sitting, he leans forward. Elbows relocate to his knees, and his hands fold. The damming deluge is swallowed, and the concrete visage softens. He gives me a look with concerned eyes.

The commandant of confidence has now become a conduit of compassion, ready to convey sincerity, sympathetic to my plight? For fuck’s sake...

I anticipate debasement, regardless.

“Preston, I’m really sorry, but you really fucked this one up... Some people just don’t have it.”

His eyes begin to dampen, and he’s holding back tears. Something I have never seen before in my life, and it scares the shit out of me. A wave of horror flushes through my veins, and it scrapes like scissors against nerve endings in its wake. It’s lit my limbs on fire inside.

Are you fucking serious!? What the fuck is that!?

(Strangely enough, within a few minutes in the conscious world, I knew exactly what ‘it’ is. But here, my imagination is met by my emotion, and they work at speeds unmet by my logic... A logic that I’m just learning to become cognizant of in the conscious world. We’ll touch on it briefly below, and even more so when we get to Cairns).

He stands, and with heavy steps, makes his way to oblivion. The door shuts, and the room shatters into shadow. A single spotlight emerges into existence in front of me, and it’s staring right into my face. I try to scream, but am still choking on a cataract of sand, stained crimson.

I might as well be coughing up chainsaws.

Sand is now caving-in against my chest, and I’m desperate for air to fill my lungs. My muscles tangle and tear in fruitless attempts to thrash about. I can’t move. This is hell. It’s now dumping against my face, and the coarseness is consuming me inside and out as it’s carried. My guts are being served on a slide of sand. The taste of blood and dust is thick in the back of my throat. And as I struggle for my last few breaths, I finally come to understand that as the last one has left, it’s me, who has become ‘oblivion’...

And I’m torn up and out of sleep, gasping.

It’s okay. You’re still here.

I laid in that bed for the next ten minutes, thinking about the shit grenade that had just detonated inside my dome, before I decided to suspend my dissection of it for another time. Partially on account of the occupancy of other thoughts involving this new place. Mostly on account of not being ready to rehash another shit show with the skeletons in that cluster-fuck of a closet, just yet. In that ten minutes, however, I had come upon three consecutive conclusions. I’ll summarize them quickly for the time being:

One - While even in my dream I tried to feign ignorance regarding my father’s condemnation turned compassion, deep down, I knew exactly what ‘it’ was, and ‘it’ terrified me nonetheless. As far as everybody close in that circle, sans Jordan, they were the amalgamation of eyes and ears that had heard and seen me sad and stupid, over and over again for years on end, and I think they just wanted to see me happy out here. They had faith in me, and I was miserable to let them down again. ‘It’, however, was the faith that had been put into me by ‘him’, as I embarked on this endeavor, and was reluctant to acknowledge in the face of failure. A faith that he had placed in me only once outside of graduating college, and it was fucking unfounded anguish to let him down. It was a faith that I saw he had in me when I stepped out and onto that tarmac.

Fuck...

Two - I’m a twenty-six year old man, and I’m doing this for me. Why should I care about what anybody else thinks? I’m incredibly lucky to have the support that I do, but, the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.

Like the ones that you’ve been ‘meaning’ to live up to for years?

Double Fuck... It’s got nothing to do with them, it’s got to do with me...

Three - I just might have come off of that plane with a bit more baggage than I had expected...

Figured those skeletons could have packed light...

I glanced around the room once again at my ten minute mark. Kevin, out cold in the bunk to my left. Our german girl above him in the same fashion. Johnny Rotten Balls’s bellowing snores reverberating through the foam and web of wire above me. A barrage of backpacks and clothing lit pale by the faint street light permeating the air via a window that’s gained a thickness at its base on accord of viscosity and time. I had made sense of those shapes and shadows. And in doing so, garnered enough comfort and confidence in the moment to put that dream on the back burner.

Fuck it! I’m in Australia...

Besides, it was the day that we finally got to vacate such a shit hole. And aside from that, I had a feeling I’d have plenty of more chances to work out my differences with those skeletons... Little did I know, it would take me until Cairns to do so...

I fell back asleep for another couple of hours, and woke up around 8:00 AM. Kevin was stretching off a night of solid slumber to the best of his ability in the confines of his bunk. We looked at each other and smiled with caked eyes and dry mouths.

“Let’s do this.”

“Fuckin‘ A...”

I didn’t say a word to Kevin about the dream. I still haven’t. I figured there was no point if I wanted to keep it on the back burner. Besides, silence was essential to a method I had subconsciously assembled in the past for dealing with such issues, and minimizing them. “The less people I tell, the less of a reality it becomes.”

Beautifully, this worked the other way as well, when I wanted to speak something into its own grander existence. “The more people I tell, the more of a reality it becomes.” I had constructed an army of irrational fears, relationships, and dispositions by such methods throughout the years. Like I had done on nights in the past, when I might have sat behind a bottle, dousing some unfortunate pair of ears in an overdose of self-disclosure in an attempt to not only solidify some sad, manufactured disposition of mine into a greater reality, but to also confirm it as acceptable.

“I’ve done nothing with my life. Of course she’s not going to waste her time with me.”

“I’m not going to make it. It’s fucking pointless to even try.”

“I am nothing...”

I knew by this time of course, that such silly states were merely the results of my perceptions playing the tricks I had taught them to. My perceptions paving down paths I had unknowingly asked them to, after my sub-conscience had manufactured them in the first place to serve some crooked agenda of mine. More often than not, it was an agenda focused on facilitating acquiescence to discomfort brought about by deliberation on aspirations left unmet. An agenda to keep me thinking that just maybe those wants are too far out of reach--be they a job, a fucking date, or a new beginning--so I’ll crack another beer in a comfortable chair and drown said deliberation. An agenda to keep me from trying to meet those aspirations. Because easier than trying and failing, was not trying at all.

Eventually, at some point in the recent past, I came to realize that my perceptions didn’t transcend truth, whether they sought to ignore truth completely, or bend it to my benefit. I knew that making a conscious decision to keep my mouth shut to Kevin didn’t change the fact there was still a problem manifesting itself in my sleep that needed to be dealt with. But, understanding the method also allowed me to use it while keeping an eye on the potential dangers of getting lost in it. I only had to be careful, that’s all. And, no, I’m not justifying it, but on the bright side, it also forced me to take on the problem on my own, which I felt would need to be done at some moment in the future.

We hurried to pack our bags amongst the pigsty, as quietly as we could in consideration of our company. Although our German friend had taken off at some point when I had fallen back asleep, (probably to go jew hunting), Filthy McFunkySack was still sound asleep in his bunk, and god forbid our much anticipated egress be Hallmarked with halitosis. We strapped on our boots, strapped on our bags, threw the keys to the front desk, and stepped out into the Sydney morning air. An air I might add, that had grown a bit chilly for the first time since our arrival beneath the shade of a grey sky. But that was no matter, the day to us remained as bright as our spirits, as the both of us marched on, high on the hike ahead to our new place of residence, Wake-Up!