you were only this nothing piece of life, pulled out of shape by the spiralling energy of all the everything that seemed so much more real than you, people who you used to be able to touch turning into vortices tearing at the edges of your mind, television ghosts caught like flies on a clear membrane, a stretching film of reality like a soap bubble that you'd like to put your finger through to see if it really would pop - friends and family and the blurred shop window faces of the city reflected and splayed onto the curved and infinite surface of a bedroom or a gutter
nice to see how much pressure it would take, how strong the bubbles really are, string them together like a stage magician making castles and millwheels and blowing cigarette smoke through a straw into the cavities, memories floating and moulded and squashed into one another, so that the cobalt and scarlet once-in-a-lifetime sunset becomes one with the evening you got drunk for the first time on beer and sweet martinis; your grandparents who never met sit uneasily beside each other in deep armchairs in a weird melded dream house full only of the things that you can remember; and you, a million collected images from photographs and mirrors and the eyes of others morphed into a twisted thangka deity with a thousand arms and eyes and a smile that flickers from fear to rage to joy and an alien voice chanting is this me? is this me?
you should recognize this world because it's yours - you're the starship captain staring from the silent bright bridge at the screen, at the tunnel of stars streaming into a funnel of warped space, travelling between landmarks in an empty darkness; you're the film star at the wheel of the insane racecar on your way to end your imaginary life in flames, just like all those times as a child in bed when your mother would read nursery rhymes and you wondered if it would hurt when the weasel went POP and the whole dream of everything would disappear and the streets would wind up like spaghetti around a fork and the sky would drop gently like an old handkerchief, and if you closed your eyes your wouldn't be able to tell your feet from your head, like a ball of energy, a bubble of archetypal light with something at its heart, something indestructible
your sister cried her makeup off and told you how much she'd missed you since you moved away, just because she was high and it was true and she'd never thought to say it before, and suddenly it was as if no time had ever passed between you, and you could see her again, not the smear of her image on the strange surface where your minds met, but her, the real her, because the finger had gone through and the weasel had gone POP and you were really touching the world for a few moments, and you were only sad because you knew it and she didn't, and you knew she would go away again
or when you saw your wife for the first time in Chicago and you'd never seen anything as real as her face and her movements and her expressions and the smell and feel of her skin when you finally worked up the courage to touch her; the shimmer of air from the lake behind the shopping mall; soft leather taxi interiors and walking through quiet suburbs for hours realizing that this was someone else's life; someone luckier than you had left for someplace brighter and left this girl behind for you, to teach you what was real
and maybe that's why you're here, to see the bubbles and pop them if you can, and you already know you'd give a year of life or all you owned to show someone, anyone, their reflection on the ghostly surface between you and say, this isn't you, is it? and hear them reply quietly,
no