little sarah Big World

“He woke up every morning, thinking that today would be a new and distinctly different day, that somehow newness was possible, as long as he didn’t remember what had come before.

Which is why he tried to remember only his dreams, as if they were the one solid truth in a sea of memory.

People, thoughts, indignities, shouts, caresses, sincerity and faking it. Ebbing and flowing. Each wave new and just like the one before it. Each night’s dreams an unremarkable revelation, which is why–after a time spent chronicling them with sincere devotion and optimism into a blue suede journal purchased for that express purpose–he eventually gave it up, leaving both dreams and memories to others more sturdy or more creative than himself.

He left the journal to bleach in the sun.

Like sun leaking through the shutters of the window, he felt warmth in small, straight, disconnected lines. There was no, he realized, grand narrative into which it all fit. No satisfying, complete story to tell. His dreams were lies that somebody else whispered into his mind while he lay helpless. Creativity, true creativity, lie in thinking about himself as a thin, straight line of warm humanity touching others while they lay trapped in their dreams.”

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(Written Saturday, May 25th, 2013 on the semi-enclosed outdoor patio at Design Festa Cafe & Bar, Harajuku, Tokyo. It was around 10 o’clock, after karaoke. Chad suggested we play exquisite corpse, passing a notebook back and forth, each writing a sentence, a thought or paragraph. And this is what we made 🙂