Dominik Pucek

I’ll get two hours of inside quiet, pass out on my desk before its time for me to get ready for work and go. Time heals all. Yeah right.

Even so, those hours under a fluorescent basement light are brutal. If I stare at anything too long I think its staring back. I get that shiver that comes from seeing something you shouldn’t have, but worse. It’s something you’re not supposed to be able to see. Your eye and mind disagree. Neither right or wrong. Books beg me to open them. Drawers muffle their demand for fresh air, for my throat. My clock is leering, telling time over and over. The numbers repeat, menacing, magnetic, automatic

3:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:363:473:473:473:473:473:473:473:473:473:473:47

until I can’t stand it anymore and have to rip myself away. LED arms staggering, swishing, swinging, starting, stopping, sloping out in parabolas towards me to cut me up, cut me open.

So I keep my eyes running. I turn on the TV and watch Real World reruns. It’s painful but less than going back to bed to hear them again. The subject matter has to be fucking stupid. Too intense, too much analysis, and they come again, the words – oppressors. I’ll turn the sound off and put on my headphones, blast some Lamb of God, Mastodon, God Forbid. Anything with a lot of noise and screaming. It drowns the others out.

It started with my name. Just my name. I would think my roommate was calling me but, no. He’s asleep. Talking in his sleep? I would always check, creeping in the dark close to his bedroom door, always open, careful not to step too loud, socks slipping against the wood floor. I’m afraid to wake him and lose my confirmation. But he never does. He sleeps like the dead. No words pass, can’t even hear him breathing. The quiet is no calm. I’d do anything for some noise.

Just my name. That’s enough isn’t it? Someone is calling me. I keep my eyes awake thinking I’m going to see something come out of the darkness. I think I do, dark shapes, swimming. But nothing is there. I keep still as a stick and leave my eyelids barely open, thinking, maybe they can see that. Maybe I can trick them.

But the calling never coincides. I’m just fooling myself. Maybe it’s the neighbors. They stay up late. But, not all night.

It’ll leave me for minutes, maybe even an hour, but always comes back as I feel my self closing in on the collapse to sleep.

Confirmation came when I heard other voices. My name again, and again. First a whisper. Then a voice joins. A woman, a man, another man, a child. Over and over until a horrific chorus builds that crescendos to WHITE NOISE and my eyes scan everywhere in the blank black, wishing that something would come, would appear and confirm beyond reasonable doubt that I’ve fucking lost it. Un-law alive.

I think about my mother. She was 26 when it happened to her. I’m 24. This is the time.

It started slow with her, too. She wouldn’t ever speak about the others. I think of her back then. Think of myself now. I feel the terror she must have felt whenever my brother or I found her laughing to herself. That uncontrollable giggling. “Mom, what’s so funny?” She smiled, said “Nothing,” and went back to it. She couldn’t help it. I know she wanted to stop, I know she wanted to, but couldn’t. It would get worse and worse, until it wasn’t laughing anymore, as if the sweet nothings in her ear grew into massive monsters emerging from her lobes, crushing her head, the pressure pressing at her skull until her foot was slamming into our oven and plates were pieces everywhere. She screamed in a language I didn’t understand to others I could not here or see, but I felt them, felt them overcoming her, “Mom what’s wrong!? What’s wrong whats wrong!?! MOOOOMMM!!! STOOOOOP!!!”

I think about the pain. Hers. Mine. Ours.

It comes to me as Metalicca comes on blasting, Hetfield screaming, “fight fire with fire.” Imagination as weapon.

I remember an exercise from psychology class in high school. We were exploring the imagination. Imagining ourselves as a tree. Feeling the roots and pushing past the soil, into the ancient dirt below, all the way into the center of the earth. Feel it throbbing. Hear it humming. Melt yourself into the core, expand expand expand…Now contract, contort and shoot yourself back to tree, slowing down at the trunk and slowly climb up up and up, sap in reverse, fill out branch by branch, feel out your leaves and begin to leave, emanate in a green essence and speed through the sky………fly……

Its all in my head its all in my control its all just that simple I can control it touch it feel it…fill in the blank…fill in the black….I lie in bed, abandon my ipod and lie still. They start to speak. I surround my self in a sphere, local, mine, magical and soothing, pink, transparent, a kiss, above and below , through the plane of the floor, and I focus…they recede, intrigued, next level forms green, healing, threading in and over the pink, sounding like reeds in wind, whispering fill in the blank… then the white to spite the noise, provide respite, stand guard and ease the pain as I release myself to sleep.

FILL IN THE BLANK> FILL IN THE BLACK>> FILL IN THE BLANK> FILL IN THE BLACK>>FILL IN THE BLANK> FILL IN THE BLACK>>FILL IN THE BLANK> FILL IN THE BLACK>>FILL IN THE BLANK> FILL IN THE BLACK>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I dream of mom, sitting at the table happy I am home, a bowl of tomato soup set at my place. She smiles, speaks my name, asks me to eat.