Tervel Andrews

WRITING EXERCISE: EXPLODED MOMENT

I always smell my drinks at parties. This was something I'd learned through repeat near-misses over the years. With this in mind, I went out to the freezing garage and took from the bag of ice, filling my cup so I could end the night of substance abuse with a beer pong cup full of Sprite. Too selfish to care about the noise I made when people were sleeping all around the house, I'd just spent the last hour or more watching Youtube videos of spoken-word poets. Now it was too quiet, not easy to adjust to hardcore silence.

I set up in what was still the guest room the last time I was here, where a girl was sleeping deeply as possible without a breathing tube being necessary and plugged in my laptop, settling down on the clean carpet. The sleeping girl's bed turned out to be a massage table, skewed diagonal, hipster-intentional style. It was one of only three pieces of furniture in the room.

Keeping quiet while typing near a sleeping person is always a challenge, so it helps if you just don't care if they wake up. I didn't. I couldn't think of anything silent to do online while high, and I didn't have my notes with me, so I browsed My Documents and chose a rough, "stream of consciousness" draft I'd thrown together the night before about a dream I never had, about a girl I'd never meet:

With no expectations, just a sense of how appropriate it was for the dead to speak on the dead, I found myself running unfamiliar streets, running through doorways that led to places miles away, and being chased by my dead grandfather, head of a lion on his shoulders like it used to be when I had this recurring nightmare as a child. The difference was that he'd never been a prophet before, trying to force me to accept his foresight as universal law. Fuck that. That's what physics is for. Yet, out of deference to his memory and the clips of insight you always carry in dreams, I sat down "Indian style" on the floor. It was dirty, or maybe just dirt.