I woke up on the wrong side of eternity. 

I woke up to grey, to skies that go nowhere. Outside my empty home is an empty street that goes in every direction but away; every path leads you right back here.

There’s nothing here.

There’s a body sleeping, dreaming, but she’s not really here. Her mind is somewhere else, off in the infinite recesses of imagination. She’s tethered to this simple form by a thin little breath of air. 

I feel like a little ship, abandoned and adrift. Mine is a little craft made of flickering light, afloat in a sea of shadows. You can watch me bob under the waves, taking on darkness like so many waves of water.

The darkness pulls me down. It seeps into me, into my clothes, into my pores, into my prose. It takes me over, becomes me, replaces me. It sings my songs in my voice, so sweetly, no-one would ever know or notice the difference.

She sings me to sleep, her hands knotted about my throat. 

In space, no one can hear you dream.

We float, effortlessly, like clouds that shall never give up their rain. We float like corpses in a river, like bugs on a breeze. 

The walls of our starship are hard plastics and metals, bending in on each other in thickening layers, almost like a thing alive. It breathes, providing us with oxygen. It swims forward, giving us motion that translates to something like a million miles a moment. I blink and we’re gone, I blink and we’re gone, I blink and we’re gone.

We’re in a sea of nothing; naked amongst the stars and the cosmic wind. Her nipple aligns with a far-off galaxy, and then the comparison is whisked away as quickly as it came. Her ass wiggles, free of all constraints. I chase her, almost out of instinct. 

Up through the ship we fly, as the ship flies up through the universe and on and up and on and up… 

The note was left tacked to her door.

In dreams, I’m your perfect man. I kill. I climb mountains and swim oceans. 

I destroy like a motherfucker. 

I wake up and I’m weak and little; my hands are numb claws. My wings are broken, gnarled things that stick out from my back like the twisted branches of rotting trees. Under my feet, the ground burns, and burns, and burns. 

I want to be your perfect man. I want you to strip me naked with your desire for me. I want you to reach for me with such force that you break my back. Yeah, I want to be busted in half by you, swallowed down by you like a pill.

Gently, she pulled the paper down, and crushed it in her hand. 

Why do people really feel emotion?

Shit, do they?

I can’t speak for people; I’m sorta a Solipsist… so I can tell you how I feel, but I don’t really dig on assuming much else about anybody else, especially after all the drugs I took. Earlier in life. And twenty minutes from now.

I figure I feel emotion as an evolutionary adaptation. Love helps us breed and live together, and everything just spread out from there. Hate, loneliness, fear of death… I’m not saying love is all we are, or anything beautiful and poetic like that, I just think that’s a good place to start. 

And it’s a nice place to come back to.

We really feel emotion because we’re animals, and animals feel stuff. They like to cuddle and have their own space and eat until they’re fucking sick of it. We’re naked little animals, behind our screens, swarming with diseases and wonderful ways to spread them.