always missing deadlines

By the time he was awake he had been tired. Unattended parties had put him in a sour mood and he hummed his favorite song to get over it. A song he never heard before and he struggled it. His previous attempts had given no yield. He drew a bath and brought a book in with him, dissolved in the steam and let the ink soak up in his pores. He preferred his words be absorbed to save time and to keep his eyesight twenty-twenty. There was a school of thought that reaction was not about sight at all, but about anticipation. He breathed aloud at the idea, closed his eyes sunk down so everything but his head was underwater in the tub.

The mirror fogged over almost immediately. Within ten minutes he could tell he was hallucinating. The volatile cocktail of heated bathwater, cheap paperback ink and inflated ego reacted so violently he knew immediately. He no longer need his eyes as all he saw were Sierra mountains and people who never existed looking majestic in their hardship. They had chapped hands gripped around shovels, wore overalls soaked in what might have been gold dust so easily disturbed. They had families they couldn’t escape from. It was again he started to hum his favorite song with a little more vigor than before. His voice was still unwarmed, the notes in a wider range than the regular part of the day would allow. It was his own personal voice that he used to talk to this Sierra wood world and the people he longed to be in it. They had a hard time listening with all their own problems.

It was a good thing he lived alone now. There were times before when his escape into dangerous dreams would have been impossible, his responsibility to the outside world too firm in its grip on him. He wanted to enjoy his baths like he had in his grandmother’s tub where he could pick any of the little plastic figurines he wanted to play with. He played right in front of her and she didn’t think a thing of it. Even more so, neither did he. Who was that child, he asked the Sierra mountaineers. Who was a child that could imagine in front of people, if only family? They continued about their work, speaking in a language so specific he could not recognize it except for the odd word. They looked up to their cabins with loved ones peering down, food cooking in a stew on top the firewood stove, those old pot-bellied kind.

There wasn’t a way to get the child out of his mind and  yet that child surely had thought. He couldn’t remember a time when there was no thinking, when there weren’t thousands of thoughts to account for behind a set of eyes he couldn’t help but avoid. There were those thoughts, and his own thoughts. Those thoughts would fight amongst themselves before the noise would spill out still to another set of rambling thinkings. It was the noise that was the worst and his hallucinations didn’t help much. All those words coming in through the various passageways into him. Maybe he should have chosen a shorter book, or one where not much happened. He wanted fewer opinions and less conviction. He craved a silence that those hard-working people of his private Sierra seemed upon. Their thoughts were unable to escape in that imperceptible language of theirs. The only thing that made it across the barrier were a few hand gestures and the look of disgust. Up above on the deck a woman whistled down. He wanted words for that so he didn’t have to listen to his own. All of this and his bathwater was starting to become tepid.