An Assortment of Not-Rights

1. May 5th

At some point in a fading dusk, Aileen wore a fuschia dress with mud- soaked brown combat boots, of which the gridded footprints trailed up to the 15th step of the staircase. She was barely visible. In this lighting, she looked infinitely merciful.

At the top of the staircase was the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

I had come here to see her [Nike] but instead, she was in my peripheral vision. Devoid of emotion, sick, and an omen of bad luck is what Aileen started to tell me I am, and that she would be abandoning me in search of a stable community of people to live amongst. More than the other words, she emphasized that I was strange.

What about our journey around the world? I stated. (This was a figure of speech. Neither of us knew enough about boats or planes to make it across the oceans, so logically speaking it would be a journey across the land mass.)

And what will we do once we reach the end? You do realize this is never going to happen, right? it’s just all so far fetched that you can always look forward to it since it’ll never actually-

She continued about my impossible dreams and how I was reluctant to face death, that in a month, maybe six months, eventually, I would choose to die. 

 Hope loomed over her, holding Aileen close to her breasts and maybe even had her in shackles. Hope, for Aileen, resembled the idea of capitalism and hierarchy that felt familiar and comforting. She was the type to deem anybody who didn’t have the same image of Hope ‘strange.’ Paradoxical; She was a hopeless case. I smiled at her because I understood she would leave regardless of what I said.

I offered her everything I had in my backpack; in it was 3 cans of soup, a jar of honey, 3 packs of matches, 2 pairs of socks, and a copy of The Brothers Karamazov that was as heavy as all the other items combined. She took one can of soup to go with the croutons she had in her own bag and left

2. June 30th

An apartment building sheltered me for the last two weeks, from a scorching heat that sent waves radiating from the ground, the cars, the pavement. The melancholy of Europe was evident in every street and telephone poll and festered beyond consciousness into my dreams. Especially in June, everything felt far more homely and eerie; it was empty stone roads & a UV you could almost hear. I wanted to make my way to the coast before August. 

In the building across from mine was a middle-aged man camping out on a floor right above the one I’m on. He was the rough kind, the type that could protect himself particularly well but thick-skulled enough to not be particularly smart about it. This was evident in the fact that he took no precaution to hide his presence and activities, but then again, I hid myself well enough to offer him the assumption that this was a ghost town. The windows in this particular room let in a decent amount of moonlight, allowing me to read before I fall asleep underneath a blanket on the wood floor.

 In my dreams, I’m often attending a funeral.