Chapter 7
What was never no not ever will not ever never ever be.
Once upon a time, Grin’s waking self had a professor who described contemporary poetry as “nothing more than broken prose.” And with that he moved on to other things. Grin’s waking self, believing his professor, deleted several dozen poems written in free verse from his computer. Still yearning to be poetic, Grin’s waking self tried to abide by what he gathered to be classical conventions of poetry: ABAB rhyme schemes, iambic pentameters, couplets, and “Your love is like” similes:
Shattered dreams
of that which I once knew
Tattered remnants
of what never came true
Shackled to my hopes
And what I felt for you
I drown in this pain
I don’t know what to do . . .
Cut away the overused words:
of that which I once
tattered
of what came
to my
and what I
in this
I don’t know
Cut away the connecting language:
I
tattered
came
I
don’t know
Shitty, yes. But Grin’s waking self felt his shitty poetry. He felt it to his core. These pathetic lines pay little homage to the intensity of the feelings which Grin’s waking self felt. Nonetheless, his words were dead before they were spoken.
Grin’s waking self, drinking a beer, mulls over a very difficult season of his life on the top stair leading up to his second floor apartment. He opens his computer, hoping to process his recent experiences by writing a poem. But the page remains blank. His muse is hiding in someone else’s head right now.
So Grin’s waking self instead opens old poems. He reads the old shitty lines, closes his eyes, and does the closest thing to dreaming that any waking self can do: he remembers. He remembers the cramped dorm room where he wrote the above lines. He remembers the girl to in whose honor those lines were written. He recalls some physical features, but something else comes to mind.
It is too much to think about, that something else. What happened once has become a will always happen, if Grin’s waking self is correct.
Later that night, after finding it difficult to fall asleep, Grin manages to surface. And, unfortunately for Grin’s waking self, Grin knows that it is time to revisit that something else. The waking self will just have to endure.
How does Grin revisit without revising?
He starts with a color, red,
then spread his revisit to a taste, bitter.
He inhales a smell, violet,
turns his face to another face.
He now has hold of a particular day, a Friday,
which he particularly hates, 11 April 2001.
He cannot recall the notes
of a song he heard absent-mindedly
as he stares into the eyes of that first girl
he professed love to in front of a full room
on several separate occasions.
Grin is in a play. Intermission is ending.
He is sitting next to a girl whose name he loves.
She smeels like violets. The two are passing the time
before the red curtain goes up in small talk.
He is nervous, as Grin always is about performing.
The girl, sensing this, quite carelessly takes his hand
and holds it between hers in her lap. She looks into him.
He wants to tear off his costume and be naked with her.
She tells him something with her sparkling eyes.
All cliches seem appropriate for about thirty seconds.
A growing bar of light alerts them.
The curtains are coming up. She quickly withdraws her hands.
That night, as Grin professed to this girl
his undying love a tenth time in a room full of strangers,
he wills his words to tell her a secret:
I Am Not Acting Now.
She knows. More precisely, she knows him.
And she does nothing with the knowledge.
Grin breaks the fourth wall. “Nesrein, I loved you once. You will always hold a part of my feelings like you held my hand for thirty seconds: casually, as if it were natural, as if it had always been that way.”
Nesrein, being a dream whose meaning Grin cannot determine, does not say anything. She just nods her head and walks off the stage, up the aisles full of cardboard cut-outs, out the back door of the auditorium, and—most importantly—away.
