If you ask me to close my eyes and tell you what I see, what I really see in my deepest and truest of hearts, I would tell you I see the Twin Towers collapsing on a television screen. No, wait. I can go deeper. You’re asking me to close my eyes and tell you what I really see in the buried depths of my heart and I tell you I see myself the first time I saw my father as a kid. It’s a memory in the third person and kid me is climbing into the back of the van and he feels shy as he sits down and he sees the white woman sitting next to his father and her skin is so pale and her hair is so light and her glasses are so big as everything after that dissolves and I don’t remember seeing him again at all until I was 17–wait. I can go deeper. You asked me to close my eyes and tell you what I saw deep in my heart and I told you I saw a void and from the void emerged a woman draped in a million white feathers and every feather had a center like an eye that was fixed upon me as she rose higher beyond the limits of the void until with a call that sounded like the ocean she split the void in half and a golden light that numbed all my senses burst forth until I couldn’t see even my hand extended out in front of me–then a finger snap and I was a child waking on the grass of Rose Ann Vuich Park in a desolate, derelict Dinuba.

I like to keep my eyes open. I like pretending I can’t get hurt or sick. I like believing that pain is fake and that the illusion can be broken through the sheer force of concentrated will. I like believing sex can be redemptive. I like believing in the alchemical mind and body, that I can transmute my anger into appreciation, that my hate is just misunderstood gratitude. I’ve never been confused by reality. I always know when I’m in a dream. Dissociation is a tease. Reality is unmistakable. It’s a sack of cobbles I carry with me everywhere I go. It’s the weight on my chest when I’m lying in bed at night. It’s understanding that my mind is a cage and the most important thing I can ever do is find the way out. It’s knowing my soul is a hammer and I must swing it with unfettered violence at the tyranny of essence and simulacra that surrounds me.

I’ve learned there is nothing more life-affirming than allowing yourself to be weak. I’ve learned the keys to the kingdom of heaven are hidden in your worst moments. I’ve sat at the edge of loneliness acting with violence against everything that held my world together, glimpsing my true face in the act and knowing he’s the one I need to save. So I walk a solitary path face-to-face with myself as the sky burns and the ice melts. I keep account of myself or risk obliteration. I strike through the pasteboard mask. I strive for the inscrutable thing. I look inside of myself and see the universe grasping for itself.

Dinuba hangs at the edge of the universe and it’s waiting to be pulled back into orbit. I’m draped in feathers hurtling out of a void and I can’t see a thing. My father is trying to talk to me and he can’t speak, but I can tell from the way his fingers clutch at the air that he’s saying he’s misplaced his heart and can’t find it. I reach for him as he dissolves and black smoke bleeds across a screen as another plane rips open the blue sky.

If I asked you to keep your eyes open and tell me what you see, what would you say?  What comes up in your deepest and truest of hearts?