I am a firm believer in writing down your dreams when first waking up. He always laughed at me for this. They may be rubbish, but they’re real. Realer than this, anyway. Realer than that feeling of something big, grey, wrinkly, trunk-nosed and African sitting in between your toes but feeling too meek to say anything about it, make anything unpleasant. Realer than these conversations where we stand miles apart and squeeze words out from afar like toothpaste. Projectile toothpaste. Realer than these walks that lead nowhere if not a house and a bedroom, realer than this feeling of having given permission for something, I don’t know, but wondering if my mouth really matched up with my face at the time. Wondering if he noticed.

I dreamt once that there were hundreds of centipedes crawling everywhere and I was the only person that minded. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I blasted pop music out at them to kill them but they only turned into flaming head ghosts.
And reality is a lot like having hundreds of little centipedes crawling around everywhere that nobody wants to care about. And when you play pop music to try to kill them, they turn into hundreds of flaming head ghosts.

So I continue with the compost that we shove into each other’s ears and do nothing. We’ll pinch our noses so we can’t smell the breath of decomposition or see the centipedes on each other’s noses when we kiss, we’ll throw brain cells to the wind and become Eeyore.

It’s terrible how it’s one of those really real-feeling days again when he’s pushing against me with my lungs in his shoulders and his face in my eyes |
and I can’t imagine how he doesn’t take the golden opportunity to do something really horrible right here; smiling like the wolf who ate the boy who cried far too much for good taste |
and he stands up at me and he makes me feel a bit better. “It may have been rubbish, but it was real rubbish,” he said.