Omne Ignotum Per Obscaenum (or All That Is Unknown Appears Obscene)

- Having a seizure is apparently like falling down.
- I want you to keep very still.
- The doctors will take very good care of you.
- Wasn’t yesterday your birthday?
- Come along now.
- Why didn’t you tell your classmates the truth?
- The nurses all have long fake nails and puffy bangs and wedding rings.
- Question: What do you do for fun?
- Answer: Roller blade, ride bikes, steal candy, read.

So I have a dream where his arms are around me and we are lying in a sick bed as you would on a gray day when its about to rain or has just stopped raining and I can feel everything about his arms, the way the wrist connects to his hand and the flesh wraps around bone, the muscles flexing, even the warmth of his blood, but this lasts only a minute or two, and then I wake up in my actual bed, next to my actual boyfriend.

I wake up wrong on a Friday. Rapid eye movement and deep sleep interrupted by a figure hovering over my bed, a figure made up of particles, swarming like gnats in perfect order, someone trying innocently to wake me because the alarm has not sounded. I take a late bus, still dreaming as the man across from me carves a demon head out of flesh colored plastic. The demon head has been placed temporarily on a stick. Because of the circumstance, I no longer have a gauge with which I can measure normality.

I sit on the beach, my legs stretched out long in front of me, the image dark in its entirety, dark like an imagined image behind eyelids, the waves rotating white and blue. Out of the corner of my eye I mistake a bird for him. I mistake the ceiling fan for the wind. I mistake Brooklyn for the ocean.