a box of cereal.

In my dream last night I was in a super market. The lights were on and it was twilight outside. I could see some stars close to the horizon just out the window. My life and ever circumstance was placed within every container of the store. Every jar of pickles was a mistake that I had made, and all my successes in life were really expensive bottles of champagne that not even I could afford to buy. 

Laundry soap and fabric softener were the promises that I had broken and never intended on keeping. And every shelf was there, full and complete of things, life; everything was me. Every time the store would close at night I would try to take all the bad circumstance I had gone through and throw them into the trash, but there was a stocking team and a quality or price control employee always behind me putting the things I was trying to get rid of back in its proper place.

It was always a battle that I could not win.

It was a terrible feeling; always having my life on display. It was a terrible city with the most curious people always buying my mistakes and reviewing them. At times they would spit my successes out --as though I was not good enough for them, as though I could have done better than the best that I had achieved.

One can of pickled okra was a memory of the first time I ate a girl out. She was on her period and I had no clue what her delicate gash should actually taste like. As that thick pulp of menstrual liquid ran down my chin in the dark I could only imagine heaven tasting that way, like oily iron.

One evening my family had come in to buy groceries. They were appalled at some of the things that were being sold in the store, as though they knew what all of the contents of this store meant or represented, as though somehow they knew my curse. They knew that everything in that store was my life, a part of me. they felt me, could breathe me, knew it was me.

My sister started vomiting as she read the ingredients to a box of cereal. It was made with self-destructive tendencies and the rotted after birth that laid on the steel tray next to my lifeless wife after she had a heart attack while giving birth to our first child, my beautiful daughter. The last moments of her life were agony and rapture as her body expelled the body that was fermenting inside of her.

And it seemed like instantly my family was in the far rear corner of the store preparing food from the store on an old barbeque I remember seeing a lot in my youth. As I walked to the back of the store to where my family was I could tell that there were two other groups of people there cooking and preparing food as my family was. A community of happy, joyous and harmonious families, but immediately as I approached these three families, mine included and there was something wrong.

My mother smiled as she was sharpening a knife she had found in a garbage can, I was trying to convince her that the knife in her hand was very important to me. She disagreed and somehow without words told me that nothing could ever be more important than family, I was not in the mood to argue so I agreed and went to a plastic table covered in potato chips.

As I began eating the chips the images of Christ blinded me from the inside out. Peaceful images of grace and kindness slowly fading silver and becoming almost like violent memories.  Images of soft clouds and tender touches against my skin turned to images of razors being drug against my testicles. Images of being feed lye until my stomach was a perfect purée of boiling human substance dripping out of my mouth slowly until finally I vomited. All these thoughts blinded my thought process as I broke out of my trance by stepping forward I slipped and fell onto the knife that was in my mothers hand. As I fell on the knife it pierced my spine and I was paralyzed the rest of the dream. 

I watched everyone socialize, but for some reason was not noticed or recognized. Every time I tried to scream my mouth could not open. Each time I tried to get up and walk around nothing happened. In my mind I was exerting enough energy to move the world, but I could not even simply move myself. I could not do anything, all I could do was pray and hope that my eye lids did not slide shut so that I could enjoy simply watching everyone and their interactions. I screamed in the cavern of my body and mind but nothing, not even a sigh or peep passed my lips. I stared at a jar of tomatoes and knew that jar was the time I raped my wife after having too much to drink. She said no, then screamed. I held her throat to help her keep quiet. The Devil was in my mind that night, and I even remember a gentle smile as I forcefully entered her dry reproductive organ.

Everyone left the store and I was swept into the corner, rigorously collected and discarded into the garbage can.

Then I woke up.