Read Anthology Complex for Free Online Page B

start to think about my mother and
how she was able to tolerate my father for as long as she did, and my mind
freezes. I've been through this before, except it wasn't a dream, it was in
real life. I was on the way to my father's funeral. I remember I had to drive from
one part of the state to the other, and the entire time I was looking for a
photograph of my mother to place in his coffin. Three nights before, I found
the photograph and I put it somewhere in my car, but I couldn't remember where.
I never found it.
     
    So now I am aware I am dreaming because this has happened before. Lucid
dreaming. I stop the car and get out of it. Before I can put two feet on the
street it's night again and I'm in the city once more, standing in the middle
of a highway. I look up and there is a billboard. On the billboard there is a
photograph of a woman I used to know named Maria, and it says she is missing.
The billboard asks me if I have seen her. Then I wake up.
     
    Maria is a woman who I was once in love with. Or I should say I thought
I was in love with. It wasn't until she left that I realized that a person like
me wasn't designed to love. I could be friendly, helpful, kind, but loving
someone was just something my brain never fully developed.
     
    When it comes to love, there are some pieces of rock that are out there
moving, searching for love, and then there are some rocks out there that are
stationary, sitting there still just waiting for love to find them. Then there
are rocks that stay stationary, but at the same time are in a way moving
because they are rotating on their axis.
     
    These rocks are not searching for love and they are not waiting for it,
they are propelling any form of love that comes its way in the other direction.
Sending it back where it came from.
     
    For a while, Maria tolerated my insanity. Once upon a time I wasn't as
organized as I was when it came to writing down my dreams. Sometimes I would
just try to remember them in my head, or sometimes I would just write them on a
random page in a random notebook.
     
    The problem was when I tried to put some dreams in a logically
chronological order, I had nothing to reference to. I could never find the
dream I was looking for. My room would become messy because I would turn the
room upside down searching for that dream I wrote down so long ago.
     
    Or sometimes my head would hurt trying to remember every detail of that
dream I had. It got really bad when I would mix up my dreams for real life
memories or real life memories for dreams. I couldn't separate reality from
fiction. The time came when Maria could no longer tolerate what I had become,
and she left. I can't say she left for that particular reason, there were times
when I knew in my heart that I didn't have any feelings for her, and I knew she
could tell, and I think that is the real reason why she left.
     
    Regardless, I got my mind in order after she left and my strange
obsession, my strange addiction, I was able to kick it. It was gone for a
while, but like that dot on that circle, the further I got away from it the
closer I was to reliving that obsession. A person can meet their destiny on the
road they traveled to avoid it.
     
    So eventually the addiction came back, stronger. I started to maintain
better organization techniques this time so that what happened last time didn't
happen again. So I wouldn't lose my mind again. I started to write down every
dream in composition notebooks, and I had a shelf for all of these notebooks.
     
    After a while I started to categorize and date the dreams. Soon after I
started to title them as if they were short stories.
     
    Chapter 12:
    STRANGE DREAM, STRANGER LIFE
     
    About twenty years ago, I had this dream. I'm sitting in a subway car
across from this man. Now I don't look directly at this man, but I'm looking in
his general direction and I just know that he is looking straight at me. After
a long time I finally muster up enough courage to look at his