last night i left the window in the front room open and when i woke up this afternoon it was freezing in my apt. i laid in bed for an extra hour just because i didn't want to take the covers off.

my dreams were very disturbing, very violent and subversive, i don't understand why. people say that dreams are a reflection of what's going on inside you, underneath, in the places that you don't walk around in when you are awake. but i didn't know that such dark, violent frightening things were happening inside me. thinking about it is making my stomach hurt, though that could just be the citric acid from the large glass of orange juice i just drank burning through me like a match on a tissue.

maybe now that i am not feeling so angry i should stop listening to black coffee blues when i go to sleep. maybe i should stop staying up all night on the weekends just to see the 20 minutes before the sun comes up. maybe i should stop chainsmoking when i am alone. maybe i should stop drinking just to feel the world at a double arm's length. maybe i should stop putting a premium on my loneliness, stop thinking that it will somehow mark me, like scars across my back in perfectly formed parallel lines. maybe i should stop thinking my perfect ordinariness is charming.

i know i am nothing and no one, but that everyone else is too, this doesn't make me special, a kind of reversed dark matter special where the empty outline of me here is somehow a full picture somewhere else. that somehow the complete transparency of me here is somehow a full color picture with real arms and real hands and a real heart, open and warm and waiting.

it's so cold in my apt. i am wearing the hoodie that my brother gave me as part of a trade a few years ago. i don't think i have washed it in all that time. i wrap myself in it when i am cold, i pull the hood down to just above my eyes. i thanked god when i saw that the people who broke into my car didn't take it that last time they broke in, the time they broke into the trunk looking for the treasure that was sure to be there since my car's cabin was empty. it was the time i left the doors unlocked in the hope that they wouldn't break the handles. i forgot that my trunk was valet locked and they pulled the lever until it was pulled halfway from the floor. they found nothing in my trunk but the hoodie, some anti-freeze, and a pair of black work shoes, heavy and scuffed.

they left them all, but still broke the doorhandle.

the hoodie smells like the trunk of my car and cigarettes. the cuffs are dirty. the inside is worn.

this is one of my favorite things to sleep in, wrapped tight and warm, the hood pulled down to just above my eyes.