Anthology Complex by M.B. Julien (new reading .txt) 📕

a knocking at my door. I pause for a moment, and then the knocking becomes louder and the man begins to yell, but I can't understand what he's saying. All I can really think about is how I have a more than visible woman laying in my bed who is lifeless and is missing a body part.

 

I look back into the room from the kitchen, and I see her. This woman laying on my bed, bleeding from her ankle. The knocking and shouting get even louder and now I can hear my heart beating. And then I wake up.

 

Of course this dream reminds me of the night Lynne fell asleep at my apartment and I laid her to rest. It reminds me about how I touched her plastic foot. This dream almost makes me ashamed because it makes me feel like I have this mutated or abnormal version of admiration for Lynne. Dare I say love, because in my life I'm not sure if I've ever loved anything.

 

The only real conclusion I could come to for the meaning of this dream is that I am trying to recreate Lynne by turning other women into her, maybe because I've never met a lady like herself.

 

Either that, or I'm subconsciously fixated on her fake foot, but now that I think about it, I'm not sure how far her amputation went. It could be her foot, her whole lower leg or her entire leg. But the only part of her leg that I've ever been able to touch was her foot. However I'm almost certain that it is not her entire leg because her limp would be much more obvious if it were.

 

I'd also like to think that the man knocking and shouting at the door is my subconscious telling me that this isn't right. That it's not normal, so please wake up. People have said that the other people in our dreams are simply other versions of ourselves.

 

This dream also makes me wonder how difficult it is to get away with murder. Most of the time the media makes it seem like c omitting a murder and actually getting away with it is almost impossible, because of course most of the stories we see or hear about end up with the criminal getting caught. How many killers do we actually know personally? And if we do know one or more, we are probably one ourselves. Probably not. But imagine you murder a random person in a city you don't live in and there are no witnesses. Do you really think you would get caught?

 

The first mistake in committing a murder is killing someone you know in a place that you live without any real plan.

 

Obsessive-compulsive disorder comes in many different forms and can be different depending on the person. Every once in a while I get a dream like this and I become obsessed with it, constantly trying to interpret what it may mean. Trying to understand what it is trying to tell me.

 

One time, a long time ago, I became obsessed with a dream where I kept taking out the trash but it would keep filling itself up, so I would have to keep taking it out over and over again. Damn garbage bags. Sometimes it even gets to the point where I am so obsessed that fiction becomes reality. One face becomes two and the lie becomes true.

 

Composition 1, Part 3

 

Chapter 21:

DEEP SHADES

 

Two nights ago I had a nightmare about murdering a prostitute. Last night I had a nightmare about a woman's foot being victim to flesh eating bacteria. The bacteria kept eating away at her leg and then eventually the surgeons had to amputate it.

 

This damn foot, I can't get my mind off of it. What's so appealing about a foot? What's so appealing about this specific foot? It's not even real, it's plastic. Man-made. I think what is really bothering me is that if I had lost a foot of my own, I wouldn't know how to deal with it, but this woman has actually lost hers and it doesn't even seem as if it has phased her.

 

After I wake up I start thinking, the surgeons in that dream remind me of a dream I had God knows how long ago, where the surgeons say I was actually dead for a little under a minute. God probably actually does know because that may have been part of the series of dreams where I was judged by God, and maybe he sent me back.

 

There are people who claim that they remember a past life, a life before the life they have now. How many people actually believe them is a different story.

 

Now there is a knock at my door, I can tell it's Lynne. I can tell because I can hear Sarah and David talking loudly as if they were excited. Even though I can't see them, I know. I open the door and it's the three of them looking up at me. All but one are smiling. Sarah begins to yell, asking me if I'm ready to plant stuff. Lynne says they could use another hand. David, he just stands there.

 

The next thing I know I'm outside and Lynne is teaching me how to give life. Sarah was helping also, but she was getting herself too dirty so her mother told her to go play with David. David who is riding his bike around the parking lot proclaiming that flowers are for girls. The indirect insult kind of makes me feel feminine. I never liked flowers anyway.

 

It's just me and Lynne giving life now, and she's going on and on about how a rose's color has meaning and some kind of symbolization to it. She's so excited about it that I have to let her go on. To see her face light up, all I can do is admire her.

 

For someone who has lost a part of who they are, it seems like she has become even more of a person. Of course I didn't know her before she lost her foot, but she really is something now. She has a reason to be angry but she's not, I have no reason to be angry but I am.

 

Now she is on the color yellow. Her color. The color I first saw her in. She tells me that a yellow rose represents true friendship. Happiness. If I could grow a yellow rose maybe I would give it to her, but chances are what should have been a yellow rose would come up a black rose.

 

I sit here planting these lilies with her on the shaded side of the building. The dark side of the building, and all I can really think about is how my feelings for her are abnormal. Mutated. Black. Dark. These words and words like them. When these lilies begin to grow I can only picture what should be white being black.

 

I am in deep thought and she is trying to ask me a question but I'm not responding. She looks at me and gives me a shove and I snap out of it, and I ask her what she was saying. Apparently she was telling me about a dream she had last night, and then she asked me what things I dream about? I ask her what she means, because people don't really have a certain theme to their dreams.

 

Then she says of course people do, she starts to talk about how she always has this dream where she is in a field of apple trees and she is looking for an apple to eat, but the ones she comes across always have dirt on them, so she never ends up eating any of the apples and throughout the dream she becomes hungrier and hungrier until she wakes up.

 

She tells me that she is always having dreams like that, where what she's looking for is right in front of her but it is wrong in some way.

 

I start to tell her about the dreams I have where I'm talking to Satan, and I tell her about how normal he looks. I go on and on until I realize that she is a little bit weirded out that I dream about the Devil. Then she starts to tell me about how when she dreams, she still has both of her lower legs.

 

This makes me think about all of the blind and deaf people in the world. All of the people who are born blind or born deaf. It makes me wonder what their dreams are like. I could only imagine. Some of them can see but they can't hear, and some of then can hear but they can't see.

 

After a little while of her talking about her leg, I ask her how it happened if she didn't mind telling me. She looks at me and tells me it was a tumor, and then starts laughing. Why is she laughing? She's laughing because having cancer in your foot is such a stupid thing to have, let alone lose a foot over. These are her words.

 

She says her foot started hurting but she didn't think it was anything to worry about. Then she felt a small bump, but for some reason she doesn't think anything of it. The bump gets bigger and then she finally has it checked out. It's cancer. She thinks to herself, "Who has cancer in their foot?" What are the chances that something like this would happen to her? Is it fate?

 

So she had to get her foot amputated and have a fake one replace her old one. The entire time she was resting in the hospital, she says Silvio, her then husband, only visited her once. She thought that he felt like she wasn't pretty anymore. That he couldn't have a cripple for a wife. Here is a woman who needs just that one person but they aren't there, and then here is my father who has everyone there for him but he doesn't want anyone.

 

After she got out she confronted him and it was obvious that he was seeing someone else, so she filed for divorce. She always suspected that Claire was the mistress, but she never had any proof.

 

Her suspicions grew even more a little while ago when Silvio found her in the hotel and gave her a beating. The only person who knew where she was staying was Claire. She says that the reason she moved to this town was to get away from him, but somehow he found out where she moved to, and he came looking. Again, she thinks Claire was the one who told him.

 

At first I find the situation a little strange, for two sisters to be involved with the same man, but then again the world is a strange place. This strangeness is what ultimately gets me to seek solitude.

 

I ask her why then does she seem so friendly with her sister. She says that while she thinks her sister may have betrayed her, she can't be certain of that. She says that Silvio may just be forcing these things out of her. Lynne has quite a story, but then again everyone has a story to tell, everyone's a writer. Some more than others, some less.

 

Chapter 22:

ALL MEN ARE DESTROYED EQUALLY

 

There are some hospitals that have no room thirteen. People are just as afraid of superstition as they are their diseases or conditions. Some people are anyway. I'm sitting next to Joe and I'm reading him a dream from one of my composition notebooks.

 

In the dream, Jesus and I are in the middle of an ocean and we are fishing and talking about religion. I ask Jesus if he thinks that the world would be better without any religion at all, and he says to me that while the intentions of most religions are good, when these intentions are mixed with human instincts there is a chance that they may become corrupt.

 

He says that one's