skin & bones & cavities

(originally posted 9/25/2012)

Sometimes at night I lay there and imagine my face with no skin on it. A skull sitting on the pillow, my brain sitting there encased in hard bone. My eyeballs floating there in their sockets like two wet marbles. The veins running up my neck sitting there exposed and glistening.

Pretty creepy, but I do it.

Other times I sit fuming that the middle toe on my right foot will not wiggle on my command. It simply won’t do as it is told. Are toes so different from fingers that they can feel they can get away with such arrogant behavior? It sits there with two toes on each side of it defiantly, seemingly above the law.

Sometimes I close my eyes, which in the middle of the night is redundant as it is already dark, and feel my heart squeezing the blood around my body. Trying to follow a single blood cell as it makes its way around my body. Obviously its speculative at best but I like to think I’m getting pretty good at it.

Takes work.

Occasionally I’ll put my hand on the wall and if its late enough and the moon is just right I swear I can feel the vacant spaces behind it. If the air conditioning ducts are considered the circulatory system of a house then the gaps between walls must be the empty cavities that get filled with blood when we’re in a terrible car accident. In my mind I can see all the dusty hollowness that would allow a rodent to scamper from one end of the house to the other without detection.

Sometimes I try and will my fingernails to grow. I know that technically they are growing but I’m talking about werewolf-type growth where they come sliding out all long and sharp. Obviously in the cold light of day you know it’s impossible but that type of reasoning abandons you after midnight. I don’t want to brag but occasionally I get a good tingling sensation going and I feel like a nail-growing breakthrough is right around the corner. If playing the piano or typing can increase the rate at which nails grow just imagine what a few nights of willing them to grow faster can achieve.

Actually, don’t imagine this if you are reading this before midnight. It might seem stupid.

Frequently I will just lay there staring up at the ceiling trying to float off the bed. For anyone that has never sincerely tried to fly I highly recommend it. Nighttime flight in the privacy of your own bedroom is much less embarrassing than trying it on your driveway after you’ve taken the garbage out and think nobody is looking.

Or so I’ve heard.

Have you even tried to just keep inhaling? You know, pretending that some shut-off switch is broken inside your lungs and you’re just going to keep sucking in air until you explore?

Hurts.

If I’m ever successful you’ll probably hear about it on the news because that would be something to see. You’ll be like “Wow, I read that guy’s post awhile ago… I thought he was kidding”.

Mostly I just lay there and try to picture myself without skin. Whenever I see a skeleton in some museum I imagine that guy sitting there centuries ago living his life. Never thinking that all he will end up as is a bunch of bones on display. Worried about this, worried about that. Never realizing that all these concerns were as meaningless now as someone in the future shuffling by and wondering what he looked like with skin.