It's mostly quiet. The dogs are having dreams.
I've learned to use my dad's cigarette machine. But I pack them too tightly, and they are difficult to smoke. Everyone is in bed by now. My hair is longer. It keeps falling into the glass of bourbon before me; I suckle alcoholic strands, and everything is gold. Everything is quiet, to the point where my ears begin to fabricate cricket fiddles. What makes the brain create counterfeit sound? I did see many crickets today.
Flies are buzzing by my face down here in the basement. I am awake.
I'm trying to be right here. Which is why I must quit drinking. Most days everything within me wants to be somewhere else, a dream, a waking life, the prospects of other places arouse. I do have a real dream now. It pumps through me. It is building an artery beneath my blood, and I have no idea where it will take me. Or how I will arrive.
When I drive through the country I know that I am supposed to be there.
It presents a right feeling. I'm not a city girl. I thought I could be once, thought it would be nice, enjoyable. But I'm not a city girl. I require God's country to tell me what to do, and I will readily bow my knees at the dirt in reverence. At soil's very edge I recognize my size. My minuteness becomes so real, my breath so deep. "Dust to Dust," I think, as though I could dive right in. Here I will lay. Here is where many have found their fleshy rest.
Back to the earth. Back to the bone of creation.
But I must keep this dream in the Really Real.
I can't allow it to be like the others, those imaginative revelries. The fabricated story I wrote on the back of my brain for no reason, save it pleased me momentarily. I can still remember very many of them, the ones that kept hold of me the longest. They never were. I'm almost sorry that I made them. I didn't really need their company amidst this extraordinary life, as simple as it is, as human as it is. I still like it. I'll like it better as I begin to take it up to a higher place. Or allow that Higher Place to lift me up.
