Of Forests & Clocks & Dreams (A Literary & Art Collection)

Rice Clocks and Dreams and Waves

Rice Clocks and Dreams and Waves

It's about three o'clock in the morning. I'd made a cup of tea and a bowl of rice. But I can't smell the scent of tea or rice. I can only smell the box of tissue in front of me. Somehow they smell like the scent of an ocean, palm trees and salt. Outside the waves must be eating the shore but there's no sound. I long to hear it but all I hear are the clocks in the room. There are two clocks here and I've always wondered why the need for two when there is supposed to be only one to which the world adheres to. They're not even in sync, one slightly ahead of the other - or behind, the difference I usually can't tell. Sometimes they sound like galloping hooves, one leg weaker than the other, and other times, like raindrops.

I can't remember why I woke up but I woke up and suddenly feel lonely. The bedroom is dark and my hands are dark. I look at my hands.

But she's here; "I'm here," she says. I ask her to hold me because I am adrift somewhere in the soundless waves outside, dancing in pirouette, and falling apart and soaring into the cosmos, into the stars, into the constellations, but she doesn't respond for a moment. Then I feel her arms wrap around my waist and she's naked on my back. I feel her hair on my neck like vines, like cloud, and I ask her if she had had any dreams. She says she does not know but she vaguely remembers a feeling of weightlessness until I woke her up. I'm sorry, I say. I give her a sip of my tea and kiss her forehead. She breathes out against my ear. I remember not to look at her collarbone. Her collarbone is kryptonic. She's a collarbone model.

"Remember when we first met," she says. I do remember. It's been a long while. She was the advertisement on page twenty three in the magazine and her collarbone was naked.

"Why did you have to be page twenty three? You deserve to be on the cover," I tell her.

She laughs. Then she stops. I eat the rice and the clocks are galloping, faster and faster. She turns to me but I can't see her that well in the dark. I can only smell the ocean in her hair.

"There's always something to be discovered you know. What's on the cover is what doesn't need to be seen - it's to keep the blind, blind."

"Blind, I'm pretty blind myself," I say.

"You only need the middle sight," she nods. She presses a finger to my forehead.

"What does your middle sight see?"

"You, out of time." She laughs. Then she gets up and with her, the sheets become her wedding gown. They prostrate themselves on the carpet. Her toes sink. "I smell rice," she says. "Can I have some?"

She pads over to the window and I make her a bowl of rice. But there's no sauce or egg or furikake or pickled plums or dried fish or nuts or ochazuke.

"That's okay," she says, "I just want white rice."

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Analysis and Explanation

This was written in Feb 2015, and beyond my earlier works, Espresso Love and its entire physical, social criticism, philosophical, psychological journey into spiritual awakening and the visionary, as well as my earlier short stories in this collection, I personally have felt my consciousness and my soul struggling and growing and developing. There are many things I've been coming to terms with, epiphanies, spiritual awakening, new forms of perception, dreams and vision - on a level much further than even what was in Espresso Love and I've been struggling to put to words the cosmic and the divine scale of things I can see stretching all before me. It's like trying to describe the universe or trying to describe God if you were in front of his full entity. It is just simply impossible and ineffable. This story is my first attempt to wander back into writing and trying to adapt to a new state of being or state of mind.