Internal Monologue v2.0

A giant explosion woke me up.

From the tv, that is. I woke up at the glorious hour of around five in the morning to see that my television was still on, and I had in my hand a copy of Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" open to Chapter Three. I had only read up to the third page, and then I remembered dreaming about insane adventures.

I promptly turned my television off, and went back to bed. And then I started dreaming again.

There was the one where it was just me and my good buddy Will, and we were going nuts rock climbing in a random place where there was desert on one side and the ocean on another. We were climbing up with ascenders, randomly rappelling down the rock face whenever we felt like it, taking in this magnificent view of a red canyon desert and a cool green sea.

Will and I were talking, and all of a sudden he looked at me intently and said, "Paul, you're a horrible person." All I could do was laugh back, but Will shook his head and said it again. "No, seriously, you're a horrible person."

I felt the rope snap and I didn't stop falling. And I couldn't help smiling as I saw the rock face get taller.

Then there was the one with me and my good buddy Ian, in a car, driving around London proper, smoking our cigarettes because we're so cool like that and getting lost but it was fine since we didn't care much for the time. We eventually started just walking around, car magically disappearing, despite the weather being tragically cloudy.

We were walking somewhere around Oxford Circus, and everything froze. Time stopped, and I was the only one moving. The scene: Ian was on the pedestrian walkway, mid-way through the street, and I was running as fast as I could to get him out of the way of that speeding truck.

When I had my arms around him, time moved again. And I couldn't stop smiling when we were flying a few yards feeling the force of the truck move through our bodies.

And then there was the one with me and my good buddy Nate. We were shooting the shit like we always do in SoCal, somewhere down in Fullerton, an orange-and-white bar space peppered with people wearing orange and white clothes, drinking orange and white things, exchanging pleasantries and dancing to the tunes of an orange-and-white clad dj in the corner spinning his orange-and-white records.

Nate and I kept drinking our martinis (in orange martini glasses, of course), two olives, strikingly green in the otherwise duochromatic environment. Everything was superb: I saw people I hadn't seen in a long time, I met Paris Hilton, and all the people who ever stole my heart were in a corner of the room, staring at me.

I wanted to melt. I wanted to get the fuck out of there as fast as i could.

Then they all started to get up, one by one, edging toward our table. I was terrified.

I felt my heart explode, the blood running over all my other organs, filling me with an intense euphoria and fear. All I could do in the meantime was clutch my chest and smile big at those people whom I longed for secretly, at those people whom I've kissed, at those people I've dreamed of kissing. And in my mind I kissed them all, kissed them with all the love I had in my heart, now literally broken, yearning to breathe in that orange-and-white room of unrequited fantasy.

I felt myself die smiling big.

And it felt beautiful.